


tea and relative distress (including zombies)

by owedbetter



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, More characters will probably show up eventually but right now that's all I've got., PTSD, Post-Zombie Apocalypse, coffee shop AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-04-10 16:02:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4398314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owedbetter/pseuds/owedbetter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It is one of the most unthinkable, unimaginable scenarios; so impossible that even this defeatist human race never factored in this outcome, never even considered it; at the end of the world, they survive."</p><p>(Post-zombie apocalypse coffee shop AU featuring the Doctor & Clara, with some surprise guest appearances. Because why not?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

  _Death, be not proud, though some have called thee  
__Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;  
__For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow  
__Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me._  

 

\-- An excerpt from "Death, be not proud" by John Donne 

* * *

It is one of the most unthinkable, unimaginable scenarios; so impossible that even this defeatist human race never factored in this outcome, never even considered it; at the end of the world, they survive.

 _Humans_ , he thought. He scowled at nothing in particular. Then again, you could say that he scowled at everything.

Coffee, he decided. He needed coffee.

Looking out the window, you wouldn't think that anything has happened. Most of London's skyline has been hastily repaired. It has never been the most particularly cheerful place. Even right then, rain clouds coloured the cityscape with a distinct monochromatic greyscale. Almost like a special effect. It has always been like this, though, if his memory serves him right (most days, it doesn't). Looking out the window right now, if you were not the Doctor (if you had not seen and been through what he has), you would think that this were just a regular rainy day in London. The end of the world never came. He would be able to look at the world and not see the blood on the streets, not hear the frightened little screams as they tried to claw off their own arms when the burning started, and maybe even remember what day it was.

But that isn't how this works.

The Doctor looked away from the window and started to rummage through his cupboards only to find them surprisingly empty.

Hadn't he just eaten? Or was that yesterday? How many hours ago was yesterday? When was the last time he slept? What day was it? How many days has it been? Too many questions, too many thoughts in his head in an all too quiet flat. He wanted to hit something. He balled his hands into a fist only to flinch. He looked. Bruised, skin split along his knuckles. When did that happen? That recognition started a revolution as all his other injuries started bellowing just the same. Scratches along his back, his shoulder, his neck. Bruised patches along his ribs from the times he'd subconsciously tried to wake himself up to no avail. He groaned.

He really wanted his fucking coffee.

"Journey!" he yelled to an empty flat. Two seconds of silence later, he yelled again. More silence.

It took him thirteen more seconds to remember something that he probably should have remembered thirteen seconds ago. Reassigned. New orders. Something like that. Journey Blue was his favourite for no other reason that she could stomach him more than any of the other pudding brains did. She could take his orders without asking too many stupid questions. Good with a gun. He shouldn't like that. He didn't. But he couldn't deny that she was useful around that way. It has been, more or less, a year since rebuilding started. They were allowed some time off for reprieve (he was, not Journey but she was assigned to care for him [maybe assigned was the wrong word as that insinuated she had no choice in the matter {she did} but that's not to say that he was particularly pleasant company] - he had no next of kin, not anymore - and she did that as painlessly as his temperament would allow) but you could only keep a good soldier for so long. There was still so much to fight.

If you were to ask him, he'd say five days. It's been five days since Journey left. A day since he'd run out of food. (In actuality, she has been gone for nearly two weeks; he has been without proper food for three days, surviving on a few biscuits a few days past their expiration date, a few hours at a time.) He'd had worse. The end of the world could have that effect on you. Make you get used to being hungry. Rations had only just become somewhat bearable again.

His stomach complained - moaned like the living dead. ( _Ha_ , he thought. He should write that down. Ironically, obviously.)

The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair - pulling harder than necessary, he didn't seem to notice, and a few strands left his scalp painlessly; wiping his hands on the cloth of his trousers - and licked his thin, cracked lips. Pulled away dead, flaking skin from them with his teeth. His stomach complained again, more aggressively. He could taste acid and blood at the back of his throat (two tastes that he had gotten quite accustomed to, unfortunately enough) and pain - an incredibly annoying, ridiculously sharp pain like brain freeze right by his temple started acting up.

Maybe he was turning. ( _Ha_ , he thought again. As if the universe would be that fucking kind.)

With a sharp exhale, he knew he couldn't just stay in his depressingly silent flat with his depressingly loud mind. There were too many books along the shelves against the walls - some of them, read; most of them, reread - along the floors, stuck between the mattress, by his sink, on top of the washing machine, stacked on top of the kitchen counter, et cetera. Fucking everywhere. Journey never touched any of the books when she was here. She'd known too well how much he'd hated it whenever things weren't where he expected them to be. At the back of his head, he wished she would have cleaned up a little. Because he sure as fucking hell wouldn't.

He was swearing too much in his own head. He just really wanted his fucking coffee. Maybe a scone too or something. (He had vague flashbacks of the Lake District upon that thought. He bit the fingernail of his thumb, trying to remember why he would think that. He didn't remember.) He should probably go out - pick up a few groceries (good God, they could _do_ that again?) and maybe get some new books, new bed sheets (his were too thin, too frayed). Something. Something else aside stay holed up in his flat, waiting to die.

He took a shower instead, maybe hoping (hoping? he could still do that?) that the time spent not eating could trick his body into forgetting that it was hungry. Hot water on his skin - an almost forgotten luxury but not the most painstaking thing in the world to learn how to remember again - and he stood on his bathtub. Steam rose to his nostrils, surrounded his ankles. The scalding water felt good. He rest his hands against the wall and simply let the water wash everything away. The water drained away clear - no blood, at least; dirt and small clumps of grey hair, if anything - and when it got colder than he liked for it to be, he shut the tap off.

Towel to skin, towel to hair, towel to (wrap around his) waist, water (from the sink's tap, cupped in his shaking hands) to mouth, gurgled water to sink and down the drain ... and no. Still hungry. Still wanted his fucking coffee. His body was only too keen on reminding him. He huffed in acquiescent defeat though somewhat grateful that he need never admit that to anyone. 

His hair was dry by the time he'd gotten out the door. In hindsight, the Doctor couldn't remember getting dressed. But he was. Fleece lined hooded jacket underneath a dark coat with red lining. Plaid trousers that he didn't remember ever buying. Boots. Two 9-mm handguns tucked into the lining of his coat, two more magazines for good measure. He hated them. Hated himself for carrying them. Hated the world and this time he was alive in for being one where this kind of precaution was necessary. He felt the pressure of his katana's hilt along his shoulder. He stood outside his door, not knowing how he got there. He checked his pockets for his keys before remembering that he wore the key beneath his shirt (he was wearing a shirt, apparently) with a chain.

He scowled at nothing. He was scowling at everything.

The streets were quieter than he remembered. There used to be youths who walked around with not a care in the world. A few of them on bikes or skateboards or whatever. A few of them would wear skirts that covered nothing while wearing heels longer than their forearms. There would be groups of laughing, smiling people - some of them taking pictures of food with their camera phones, some of them talking into their camera phones as if to an audience. He could remember a few of them texting with one hand while blabbering into another phone in the other. There was a lot of remembering to do - for the vague, Sisyphean hope that there could be any other reality that didn't involve this. That they really could carry on.

These days, people were much quieter. A lot of them kept more to themselves and hardly anyone looked at anyone in the eye. Everyone was in a rush to get home even though, for the most part, it had been declared safe. It was going to take a while before anything could ever _feel_ safe again. A long, long while.

There were still relief efforts that were much harder to integrate in other parts of the world; the threat had turned plague to pest control, there were hardly any of them now. Still, everyone carried something to fend them off. People would see him with his katana and nobody would bat an eyelash. Children would see their parents turn then start to burn before their eyes and then shoot a bullet to their brains without flinching. He vaguely wondered if there were ever going to be a day when the streets stopped smelling like decaying flesh.

People walked past him without a word and he walked past them without a word. No one bothered him and he didn't know what he preferred - the silence of his flat or the decided silence of the people around him. Both offered no reprieve from the memories that taunted him in his mind - his traitorous thoughts, his stupid head that remembered things he would rather forget and forgot things he should remember. But outside offered some atmospheric noise. It was nice if you could forget that it was the end of the world. The click clack of feet against the pavement gave some modicum of comfort, some semblance of human presence that made it feel like he wasn't the last of his kind.

The Doctor heard a shuffle along a street corner - the unmistakable sound of flesh against a wall. A groan. Bottled water falling from the paper bags the stranger was carrying and onto the dirty pavement. The stranger - a man, the Doctor guessed - was crying. Shaking.

"I wasn't- I wasn't bit-" _Stupid_. "I swear! I wasn't- I wasn't!"

He looked at this stranger whose fingers were frantic upon his sleeve-covered arm, scratching and scratching and scratching. He looked at the Doctor with pleading eyes, shaking his head. The Doctor took hold of his sword's hilt, a sharp, swift  _shing!_ in the air. The stranger's breaths grew heavy, still shaking his head, and he sank to his knees. The Doctor watched, fingers flexing on the worn leather.

His heart, frantic in its dying pace, beat so strongly that the pulse reached his ears that as he looked upon this towering man (all grey and fierce, unblinking eyes) that did not look upon him with bloodlust but with weary pity. He stopped begging. He swallowed and bid himself to speak with as much dignity as he had left. Death burnt cold in his veins. His fingers trembled. His mouth watered. He was so cold, he was on fire. It has been 23 hours since he'd last encountered one of them and thought that the nip on his ankle didn't count. (" _It didn't break skin, honey, I'm fine!_ ") His name is - soon to be was - Kenneth. Not that the Doctor would know that but he had a name. He had Mack waiting for him back home and 13-year-old Nico. He would never find his sister, Mia - she's still alive, hiding in Norway with her husband and two resourceful teenagers they'd managed to befriend along the way, though he would never find out - and she would never know what happened to him.

These were his last thoughts. He forgot to think about calling his family but somehow, he didn't really want to. How do you say goodbye like that? His heart never slowed, it stopped his teeth from chattering. The old man, for all his scowling angry eyebrows, was more patient than he thought he would be. He had just one request.

"Make it quick?"

"Aye," replied the Doctor. A pause. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

The stranger nodded, tears streaming down his face. He closed his eyes and breathed, hands closed into a tight fist. The last thing he ever heard was the sound of a blade in the air. Then nothing. His headless body fell to the floor, warm red quickly staining the pavement. Kenneth's fingers twitched. His eyes were, thankfully, closed. Blade cleaned with the back of the man's shirt then sheathed once more. He wore leather boots for a reason.

The Doctor picked up the dead man's fallen water bottles. They'd rolled far enough away that the blood had not traveled that far quite yet. Two young things, he couldn't be bothered to figure out what they were, rushed past him to scavenge what remained of the corpse. Wallet, pocket money, a packet of gum? Whatever they could find, he'd seen enough of them. He didn't say a word. He still just wanted his fucking coffee.

A Nando's was open just a few barred doors past where the body laid. There were too many people as it had become more of a soup kitchen than anything. Barter was just an acceptable form of payment as much as pounds were but the Doctor wasn't there for food. Too many fucking people, too many fucking pickpockets. He'd just strolled in to tell someone who looked like they were in charge to tell them to call the body in. Clean up needed to be informed immediately. He didn't have a mobile so he couldn't do it himself. The "looking-in-charge" person blinked at him and nodded. There was a way about him that people just tended to do what he told them to do. He left. He would have asked for a coffee but there were too many people. The smell of food had gotten to him, though. His stomach was practically howling.

There was no particular destination, really. Half an hour's mindless, aimless walking. He was more wandering about, almost hoping that his feet could think better than his head did. Practically dragging himself along the pavement, he was. He'd forgotten about the two water bottles he'd stored in his trouser's pockets. It was only about twelve steps later that the smell hit him. So strong, so deliciously decadent that it was enough to almost make him believe in God. Almost.

A bell rang when he opened the door himself, the smell hitting him stronger than before. _Freshly baked bread._ The Doctor couldn't help but close his eyes upon entering and moaned, a guttural groaning sound, as the reality of this place hit him. An actual café. An actual fucking café. 

"Don't think I'll ever get tired of seeing people do that."

Coming to his senses about a second too late, he blinked his way into actually, properly looking at where he'd stumbled into. Paint was peeling from the walls. One of the windows were still barred but there was just enough light to make it look alive. This was a place that shouldn't even exist - it was the closest thing to something that had never been touched by the end of the world. The interior was painted a pale, pale blue and so scarcely decorated that it made the place look bigger on the inside. But there were a few loaves of fresh bread just waiting - baguettes, focaccia, bagels, even English fucking muffins - to be devoured. And the place wasn't too crowded, which was surprising enough in itself. Just a few people, minding their own business and dunking their warm biscuits into their hot tea. Crowds should be flocking to this place on the smell alone. But it was nice. Quaint. Quiet. It didn't make any fucking sense. It was impossible.

And he was dying for a fucking coffee.

The woman looked up at him. There was hardly any other direction for her to look, really. Her eyes were huge. Wider than any other living human's. And sad. But she was smiling? That was what people did when the corners of their lips curved upwards when they were _happy_ , right? But she was sad too? This woman even had that thing on the cheeks where it looked like it was caving in on itself. Dimple, as the word would register eventually. So round were her cheeks, especially when she did that smiling thing. The Doctor had just killed a man without being bothered but a smiling little stranger? He didn't think humans could still do that. Smile. Joke around. Be warm. It was almost enough to make him forget that he was hungry. Almost. She'd spoken to him but he'd just stood there and blinked, thin lips parted as he gawked upon the impossible sight before him.

"I-" Even he didn't know where he was going with that sentence. She broke him off before he could even begin to embarrass himself.

"Sit," she said. A command. She raised an untended brow. "Coffee?"

" _Please_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just had the idea and played around with it and next thing you know, I've got twenty three handwritten pages of this story. I was just discussing zombies with my friend while binge rereading a few whouffaldi fics and next thing you know? Well. Let me know what you think! :)
> 
> Y'all can thank Carrie (@centuriesuntold on the tumbles) for the title inspiration. Sort of. xxx
> 
> God, what have I gotten myself into.


	2. Chapter 2

" _Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope._ " 

\- From "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

* * *

Some say that the Earth was made in a day. Some say that the creation of everything all started with a single explosion.

There are many, many questions that human beings have that will never be truly answered. The meaning of life, for one thing; what happens after you die, what are souls made out of? These are some questions in the human experience that will never be answered no matter how many times you curse at the heavens and the stars. Not definitively, at least; not in a concrete way. Not in a comforting way. (Some days, it can be easy to think ' _not in any way that matters._ ')

No human can have this knowledge - one could argue that no sentient being in existence can have this knowledge. But there is something that humans do know now, something that they will know for the rest of their species' existence after these events, and it is this.

The end of the world did not come overnight.

It was long and arduous. It was seemingly endless days and nights with many, many questions that haunted all of them in the dark. Morning birdsong and evening cricket chirps and London traffic and touristy exclamations of where to eat and where to go and "Oh my God, it's colder than I thought it would be!" - everyday noises, basically - replaced by the sound of tireless limbs that dragged themselves, groans that never quieted, and the frightened crying of all those who still had life left in them to weep. 

Of course, there was the terror. There was the running for your life - especially when it first started to go really, really bad - and there was the endless swinging of blades (some serrated saws then needing to be abandoned in the flesh they'd gotten stuck into while the walking, unfeeling dead simply kept carrying on), there was the sound of blaring car horns as crowds rushed to some ideal safety in a proverbial "far away from here" promise, and there was the killing and the being killed. It was the Hollywood expectation of the end of the world - yes, it happened - and there was chaos, there was looting, there were fires and mobs, and dear God, you could protect yourselves from the undead but there was hardly anything that could protect you from the stupidity of human beings.

Some would not call that stupidity, especially if they were the ones who acted upon it. Some would say it was the child-like belief that humans have in hope. The grieving, human hope that could drive you mad with irrational rage and make you think yourself, and your loved ones, an exception from the laws of life itself. Make you wish and curse at whatever higher power was listening because you, righteous you, believed yourself to be owed better. There was plenty of that. Clara Oswald would never deny that - nor can anyone who has had to live through these days, not really. Neither will they blame each other. Not when the grief and guilt was still so profoundly shared.

But it didn't come all at once, going back to the point. It didn't come overnight. The worst part, arguably, were the days in between. The same could be said for the world that they now have to live in - this life after the end of the world. The rebuild didn't come overnight either. The days in between were still just as hard. They kept busy, though. There was still so much to build back up.

The bell rung and she bore witness to one of her favourite sights: a person so overcome with the scent that the little shop had to offer that their eyes glazed over and rolled to the back of their heads in near ultimate bliss and moaned in absolute delight. Clara couldn't help but smile - as did Shona. The paid of them shared a look with one another before the blonde went back to man the ovens. Should be ready any minute now. To their new guest, she offered a genial greeting. Most everyone knew everyone within the radius of this cafe. It was not a remarkably large number, no, as she could imagine that the numbers of the population have dwindled to lower than that of the outcome of the plague some centuries ago, but they were a tight knit group. Uncannily formed, yes, but there was a time and a place for that story. This was not it.

He found himself an empty booth, following her instructions, and sat himself down, katana unhooked from his skinny shoulders and safely laid to rest just beside him. His eyes were blue (bright blue like cloudless skies from sunny days she could only recall now from almost dream-like, practically romanticized memory) and she only noticed them, properly noticed them, for how they stuck out from his pale, pale skin. They were overactive eyes for how they scrutinized every inch of the place with a suspicious, disbelieving glare. He looked like he was scowling but Clara, being Clara, wanted to believe that that was mostly due to his eyebrows.

She stood, waiting for the coffee to properly brew, and she watched him. (He watched her when she wasn't looking.) He kept licking his lips and biting his fingernails (favouring the one of his right thumb, most of all), restless. His back was curved to the point that he looked like he was curving into himself. Head bowed low, he kept swallowing. It took effort for him to do - he couldn't hide how he had to flinch with every swallow - and Clara, being Clara, noticed. Knew. Clara always knew. She left the coffee to brew on its own for a while.

"Shona," she called to the other woman. The swinging door opened and a blonde woman, about the same height as Clara, popped her head out

"Yeah?"

"Give us a whole one for the stick insect on table 12, yeah? Fresh out."

"How come?" Shona scrunched her nose, chewing her gum.

"Ever seen him before?"

"No."

"And you remember how we deal with newbies?" Clara never changed her tone - an educator's modulated calm control - and she rest a single hand against her hip for good measure. A time-old pose of authority. Shona bobbed her head as if nodding and relented.

"Yeah, yeah. All right, all right."

"Five more minutes 'til they're good, I reckon. Tegan ready to mobilize yet?"

"Still trying to get the tyre up to rights."

"Well get Perkins on it if you have to, we can't be late for distribution. I won't allow it."

"Yes, ma'am!" She gave a flippant salute, heels clicking before she gave her most histrionic soldier's march as she did as she was told. The door swung to and fro lazily upon her departure. Clara rolled her eyes, smiling despite it all.

A joke made in poor taste, if thought about in hindsight, but Shona McCullough was not the young woman you turned to for gracious tact. And Clara Oswald was not one to be so easily offended in the first place. The coffee brewed, slowly dripping into the pot, and she made her way to their stocked refrigerator. She took a plastic container that contained exactly a litre of cold, lemon-infused water and on her way to the stick insect's table, collected a clean glass from the shelves. Hard plastic, opaque in its make, and tinted a dull mint green. Made for milkshakes, probably, from a time long past but they made little fuss for aesthetic these days, to no one's surprise. She presented the glass to him and made a show of pouring the infused cool water into it.

"Coffee's brewing. Shouldn't be long now," she said by way of explanation as she slid the glass to him. "You look like you could use a bit of water, though." 

The stick insect of a man blinked at her rather rapidly. Lost. Clara arched her brows, almost daring him to defy the order and as he was sat down while she served, it was a very rare instance where she actually towered over someone. Not by much, granted, but it was enough for him to know where exactly it was that he stood with her.

"Where'd you get the lemons?" he asked as he thanklessly took the glass in his hands; she couldn't help but notice that his long, thin fingers were practically trembling. (Being made to sit still made his hunger [and his desire for his fucking coffee] more pronounced.) His voice was remarkably steady, however. Almost accusatory, anyone else might have thought him rude for it. But Clara, being Clara, knew too well now what hunger can do to even the healthiest body and to one of even the cheeriest disposition.

"Grew them. We've got a bit of a proper farm now, just a few miles out."

Before he could ask anything else, she turned around to (presumably) get his coffee. When he touched the glass' rim to his lips and let the water in, he realised he couldn't stop drinking it. The lemon's flavour gave the water just the slightest bit of tang but nothing too obtrusive that could make him stop or turn him off of it. He gulped it all down in quickly succeeding gulps without ever once stopping for breath. He didn't realise that Clara was watching but when he looked (bothered by the prickly, tingly feeling you got at the back of your neck when you felt like you were being watched), she'd looked away. She was pouring the coffee into a rather large mug.

Shona came out with a few large plates, steam rising from what looked like flatbread from afar, and offered one to Clara, which she graciously and gracefully took while Shona went around to deliver the other plates to the other patrons of the establishment. Though short, with features that made her look soft in every which way, Clara handled the cargo steadily. Much more steadily than Shona, at least, who actively had to watch her every step, muttering to herself and to all those around her that: " _I can do it! I can do it! Just you watch- just you watch me do it!_ "

In the cafe's kitchen, things started becoming busy in a way that didn't exactly make sense to him.

"Coming in hot!" said a bellow from within as movement and steam and the shadows of feet briskly walking made their way this way and that. Clara looked none too bothered, she was even smiling as activity started to kick up back there, and she brought him the plate and the mug.

"What is this?" He was holding on the milkshake glass with both hands, staring at the plate.

It was round piece of bread with beautifully full, golden crusts on the edges. Gorgeous. Bubbling, oozing yellow with fresh green just sinking in from the top, a drizzle of honey atop everything, while a thin layer of red from the tomatoes peeked beneath. The smell was almost overwhelmingly overpowering. 

"What's it look like?" She was smirking. He said nothing, he just blinked up at her. "It's pizza."

"How?"

"You know the original recipe, otherwise known as something pretty much close to  _this_ , was something that came out of poverty?" she started, not really a question. But Clara, being Clara? Once she got a story going, there was hardly any stopping her. "I don't know the whole story of it, never did much pay attention to history when I was little, but my mum always said that the simplicity of it reflected the time it came from. There wasn't a lot to go around, pretty much what we're going through now except a lot less- you know. George A. Romero. Anyway, a lot of the food we've got left is a bit- _boring_ , really. Same old same old and that can drive anybody mad. So now we experiment with what we can. There's loads and loads of stored flour to work with and, in the beginning, we had to make due with rubbish substitutes. We had to use watered down rice milk for a long time until the livestock matured enough to make proper milk and cheese and eggs and stuff. Now we're starting to get things like thyme and rosemary and tomatoes and all that. This one's got a bit of a kick to it, my mum's old trick. Honey - hardly ever spoils, thank God - with a bit of chili."

"I didn't-"

"I know you didn't. I'm offering."

"Why?"

"You're skin and bones, mate; you could use a bit of food in you."

"But I-"

"Oh, shut up and eat, will you? Sugar?"

"What?"

In hindsight, her immediate ability to keep him on his toes was one to be admired.

"For your coffee," she answered.

The Doctor could only nod and she was off again. There was hardly any arguing with this one as she barely gave anyone enough breathing room to even think to argue. That, and his stomach was weak and the smell of food made him truly recgonise just how hollow his stomach felt. The pain was sharp that he felt it everywhere. Energy was both lost to him from the lack of food but also filled him as kind sustenance presented itself to him. The pizza was harshly cut into four large slices. It was hot to the touch and even hotter when he tried to bite into it but by God, it was as good as it smelled. He couldn't remember the last time he ate something and actually tasted it. And how good did it taste that it was all he could do to keep himself from moaning again. It was a simple dish but more flavourful than anything he'd eaten in the last five or six years. The heat made his eyes water but he couldn't be bothered to care as he kept eating.

She came back with a little plastic container that had a lid on it - the kind of thing you might see from a primary school nurse's office that usually kept cotton balls or the like. There was the word **_SUGAR_** crassly and painstakingly writ with drying black marker on used paper (there were printed words on the back that were barely visible through the light) that was then stuck to the little container with sellotape.

"How many?" She took off the lid to reveal that inside was granulated white sugar with a plastic scoop typically found in dispensers of powdered baby formula. He managed a swallow and every time he looked up at her, he grew more and more puzzled. Like nothing about her made sense.

"When did we get sugar?" he managed to ask, setting the half eaten slice down. She set the sugar container next to his mug of coffee and he set on with putting one, two, three- _seven_  full scoops of sugar into the coffee. Clara raised a brow but said nothing of it.

"Been regularly distributed for a while now. Technically, this stuff didn't even go bad. Where have  _you_  been?"

"Home."  _For lack of a better word,_  he thought as an unspoken addendum.

Without invitation, she slid to the free space next to him and he slid just a bit farther along accordingly. She rest her chin against the back of her hand whilst her elbow was propped up against the table as she watched everything. Like a supervisor. From the back room, they came out with stacks of black boxes. About four people, their faces all blurring together for him that he didn't even bother trying to remember. Presumably more pizzas were in the boxes but he noted that the shelves where there had been loaves of bread before were now quite depleted in stock.

"I thought this was some sort of café not a restaurant," he managed to offer.

"It's a bit of everything as it's the only place within radius where we got enough ovens to work but we've got truckloads of unused stuff in cargo holds after everything. The things that didn't rot anyway. Flour, yeast, sugar. Most of what we can give is just coffee, bread, tea and relative levels of distress so technically, yeah, we're more a café than a proper restaurant. Sure."

"Who's in charge?"

"Nobody really," she shrugged. A pause. He looked at her, ever increasingly puzzled, and looked like he was about to carry on with asking until Clara, being Clara, cut him off before he could even try. "About three or four years back, I was the one who took initiative for the food preparation and distribution so technically, here, I'm the boss. Power supply's still pretty lacking but everything's organised enough that we can take the food to the others nearby, trying to help with the rebuild so nobody's got to queue up or anything just to eat. Donna's the one who keeps the records, inventory, and the census to make sure we've got enough to last per quarter."

She was quite thorough, as if already anticipating the questioning that his curious eyes blazed through and promised. She could take a cue rather well.

The café took a bit of quiet once more as the boxes and its deliverers were out and everyone was keeping to themselves, eating a bit of pizza just the same as him. Not a single person was lacking - except for Clara. She didn't seem to mind, though. There was hardly a hair out of place for her - short that it was, just as the rest of her, just a few inches above her shoulders. He ate in humbling silence, thoughts loud in his own head as his body only too truly gave in to the necessary desire for food. Her fingers tapped against the table in an undecipherable rhythm before she broke the long silence, where she'd let him eat in peace, in a hushed, almost conspiratorial voice with eyes so, so wide and so curious that he couldn't quite comprehend how they did that.

"Hope you don't mind my asking but- you're _the Doctor_ , aren't you?"

"Have I got a _reputation_ now or something?" 

He dreaded the answer, looking decidedly away from her as he finished the singular slice he'd managed to work on. Already, he felt fuller than he had in years but at the same time, he knew he could still finish the rest of what was on the plate. He should really thank her but that was the farthest thing on his mind right then. Especially since she, apparently, knew who he was. It was almost enough for him to lose his appetite.

"Not one to be ashamed of." Bright blue eyes looked up at her for that and he was confused to note that the eyes that stared back at him were ones that so refused to be scandalized or impressed or something along the lines of both. No, she was just kind. Not in a way that forgave him blindly without her knowing what his innumerable sins were, no, but in a way that said that she knew. In a way that said that she was a sinner too. How saintly of her. "Not here," she added.

How sweet her voice had turned that she might have reached out a hand in comfort if his were a posture that encouraged that or even one that allowed for that to happen. It wasn't.

"Why's that?" he managed to ask.

"Journey used to drop by pretty often. Helped out a few times before she was shipped out. Told me a bit about you, that she was taking care of you for a little while. I was actually wondering if you'd actually come 'round one day or if I'd have to hunt you down myself."

"Why would you hunt-"

"She told me you were stubborn." He huffed. "And that she was scared to leave you alone... which probably means that you shouldn't be." He huffed again.

The frown lines between his brows deepened as he frowned even more but it only made her grow - not because she was taking the piss out of him but because she'd read that as him being more confused than an expression that marked that he actually took offence. 

"How does this place even... _exist_?" He gestured freely, some colour slowly coming back into his skin as some warmth and sustenance came to him with the combination of both the coffee and pizza.

"What'd you mean?"

"This- this place, just look at it! It's all wrong!"

"Looks like a regular café to me."

"Exactly."

"So?"

"This doesn't happen! People should be at each other's throats, eating at each other to get what they want-"

"They already have," she deadpanned. He blinked rapidly again, licking his lips and stammering a long while before he could form a coherent sentence again.

"Not like that but-"

"You'd be surprised what people would do for people they love."

The Doctor was notably taken aback by that, blinking and frowning at her more than before (which, quite frankly, was saying quite a lot).

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Has it ever occurred to you that at the end of the world, when everything that could go wrong _has_ gone wrong, people might actually work _together_ to survive? To save each other just as much as they try to save themselves?"

"No," he answered, more quickly than he would have cared to ever admit.

"Life and soul, you are." Clara smirked, pushing herself back from the table as her fingers tapped against its surface. The Doctor rolled his eyes and scoffed.

"I'm realistic."

"You're the one staring at reality in the face right now and won't believe it."

Had an explanation and a retort for everything, didn't she?

"I'd believe it," he started, drinking down the rest of his too-sweet coffee. "If you'd explain how this all happened."

"It's a long story."

"Time's all I've got left."

"That's not true." Very sure of herself, this woman. "You can pay," she offered.

"Yeah, I've-" He trailed off as he started patting his pockets but found only the two forgotten water bottles from the corpse just a few minutes ago that he then put atop the table with the rest of the food and drink she'd laid out for him. "Ah, shite. I didn't- I've left my wallet at home, I-"

"I didn't mean payment like that. The government can issue a universally accepted currency all they like but it's all but worthless if there's no governing presence with the citizens and a representative who speaks for the majority of us. We're not just all going to go back to how things were after all these years where most of us had to fend for ourselves in the first place. And we're doing just fine on our own so far."

Everything he said, no matter how brusquely taciturn, seemed to amuse her. All she could do was smile at him. He had half a mind to think that she was, maybe, malfunctioning.

"What then-"

"You can pay with the water, for a start. Whatever you've got, really. We're not particularly picky."

"I don't-"

"You can stay as long as you've got something to share. You can also stay even if you haven't got anything to share but help out instead. Or both. Most of us tend to do both if we can."

"Share what?"

"Anything. Anything you've got that the rest of us can use. First rule."

"What's the first rule?"

"Love your neighbour as you would yourself," she replied as if it were a matter of fact.

He tried not to scoff at that as the way she'd looked at him said that that made him reconsider. She was expecting him to give a rebuttal, almost challenging him to, to give his reaction of how the whole thing should have been preposterous. Nothing but an old fashioned fairytale concept filled with impossible heroes that didn't exist. Though that was what he cynically believed, he wasn't about to just hand over that satisfaction to one already as presumably egotistical as herself. It wasn't like she made any big secret of it.

"Which means?"

"You help us out, we help you out. You don't help us out, we help you out all the same and you'd feel bad for not helping us then end up helping anyway." She spoke with a strong conviction, certainty ringing with her every syllable, and very quickly that if one were not used to the speed with which she spoke, they might need for her to repeat whatever it was that she said just to hear it properly, not to say on the time they'd need to process it. Machine gun motormouth with words she spits like ricocheting bullets. How fortunate that he is quite attuned to quick wit. He is, after all, very clever despite how well she, being Clara, seems to be very able in the art of making him appear as if he were not. "Very egalitarian. My dad would be proud."

"That doesn't work."

"I'm not saying it was easy to do, because it wasn't, but it's worked out pretty well for us here so far."

"How?"

"You have kids or something? Brother, sister? Best friend? Wife, husband, lover?"

"No." _Not anymore._

"Have you _ever_ loved someone?"

He paused again to blink quite a few times.

"What kind of question is _that_?"

His brogue became more pronounced than it ever was before.

" _Have you ever loved someone?_ " she pressed on. He licked his lips again and swallowed, unable to stop himself from answering.

"Yes."

"Then you _know_ ," she replied in such a self-assured way that it was almost infuriating, as if that answered everything.

"That doesn't-"

"We don't pretend it's going to be good and peaceful and quiet forever," she continued, patient as ever but there a rang something more like exasperated breathlessness in the way she spoke now.

"Things are bound to get bad sooner or later but right now, I think- I think a lot of us are just _tired_." Clara allowed for her shoulders to drop and though she kept smiling, though there was laughter and a lightness in her lilt, he could not help but notice how her eyes shone with something that looked like tears. If he were to listen to the words carefully enough, he'd hear the truth of her that she'd so rarely shown, if he knew her well enough. This was confessional, almost, though there was nothing of her to suggest this aside from his own gut feeling. If he were to just listen, truly listen, he'd be able to hear exactly what she was saying in between the lines. And look at her and see her, just as she was. Happy and sad, alive and so tired - all at the same time. Definitely malfunctioning. 

" _Really bloody tired,_ " she continued. "And confused. And- I don't know what else. Trying to heal, you know? Heal as best we can, anyway."

"Doesn't answer my question."

"What question?"

"How can a place like this exist?" 

A place so filled with peace and that was so good was what he meant to say. This place and everything and everyone in it, they were all bathed in its absolute impossible human normalcy. The old kind. As if the world as they knew it had not ended in the hands of the living dead.

In truth, there was evidence of it every which way you looked. If he were to look out the window, there were the fallen ruins that were once proud monuments. It was a devastation that they'd gotten used to the way people, even before then, took in the smell of polluted smoke was one that they simply had to live with. But it was her, it was the people like her, it was the people with her - how they were working together, how they made jokes and smiles and spoke so lightly of and with each other. How they rose from the ashes and lived again, as if it were something that was possible to do after all of this. It was not something that the Doctor could so readily comprehend for how long, so long, too long had he been in the arms of war and terror that anything else had become practically alien to him. That it was easier to think himself as not human for all the things that he has done that has cost him his humanity.

But Clara, Clara, Clara - though he still knew not her name or even offered her the simple thanks that should have been easy to give after all the kindness she'd showed but it slipped from his etiquette now, his mind preoccupied - how brightly she smiled, how kind she stayed. It made no sense and how lulled and pulled was he to her, ever the moth to her flame.

"I've just told you-"

"You didn't tell me _how_."

This, he needed to know.

"That's just the thing about the human race, Doctor. There's all the bad bits that make us do things we're not proud of for reasons that are usually well-intentioned, yeah, but- sometimes, we're capable of good things too. Sometimes, we can choose to do the right thing. Sometimes, all that anger and grief and confusion- and all of that  _fear_  can just... make you _kind._ Bring you home." And Clara, being Clara, sounded almost wistful now and swallowed. Bright eyes, like honey on an open flame, look away and she lets a beat of silence in between the words he could not find a reply to. She forced a cough and slowly started to slide away from the booth's seat.

"Anyway... best get back. Shona might blow something up back there on her own. Enjoy your food. This one's on me." She rose to her feet, a hand tentative and light on his shoulder. "Don't be a stranger."

"But-"

He didn't want her to go - the first real company and human conversation he could ever remember having in the longest time. Not even with Journey did he have that kind of companionship.

"Come back some other time. Tomorrow, if you like. Ask me again."

"Why?"

"Because I've got things to do now and my sous chef might set my kitchen on fire without my help. If you need more coffee, the pot's right there. Try to go easy on the sugar."

She had her back turned to him when he spoke up again.

"What do I call you?" he asked.

"Clara," she answered, throwing him just the barest hint of a glance back over her shoulder.

"Clara?" he called to her again, her name finding home on his lips, like he'd been saying it all his life.

"Hmm?"

"I-" His pause made her properly turn to look at him once more. With the biggest, bluest, oldest, saddest eyes she has ever seen that did not, at that moment, even think to look away from her, he swallowed, nodding. "Thank you."

From a small smile did she grin now at him. Beam at him, even, and how her entire face - round and wide that it was - lit up. She looked away, though still grinning as she nodded to herself for she knew, she'd read from him that this thanks was a compliment he did not so easily give out. It felt as if she'd just earned something. (And she did.) Clara smiled at him and spoke with one last firm nod before she retreated back to the kitchen.

"You're very welcome."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do let me know what you think of this story so far! Thanks very much for all y'all who left comments & kudos. You make me a very happy Jo. And yes, all those little namedrops are exactly who you think they are. ;)
> 
> P.S. The pizza recipe is from this website. The honey with chili flakes is a fucking game changer, let me tell you. https://sortedfood.com/recipe/8677


	3. Chapter 3

_"If I've killed one man, I've killed two--_  
_The vampire who said he was you_  
_And drunk my blood for a year,_  
_Seven years, if you want to know.  
__Daddy, you can lie back now._  

 _There's a stake in your fat black heart_  
_And the villagers never liked you._  
_They are dancing and stamping on you._  
_They always_ knew _it was you.  
__Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through._ " 

\-- From "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

* * *

They say that every face you see in a dream has been a face that you have seen before. It could have been in passing whilst strolling around a busy walkway. It could have been a stock photograph that came up in a vague Google search. Whatever face it was, it existed before you dreamt it - it existed outside the realms of your imagination. Sometimes, your dreams came from something very, very real. Unfortunately, the same can be said for your nightmares.

Picture the scene. This is how the end happened.

They dug deep into the burrows of history and found that this planet was more alien than they ever thought it could be because the main truth of it is, the sickness has always existed. There is no one fixed point that could tell anyone where and when and why this ever came into existence - the only thing that can be said is that it did. It does.

There were records dating as far back as 60,000 B.C.E. of preserved skulls bashed in and fossilised human ashes found along the banks of the Upper Semliki River in Central Africa that depicted what could be the very first (recorded) outbreak. The evidence doesn't stop there. In a dig site in 1892 at Hieraconpolis, Egypt, there was information unearthed that baffled archaeologists for years for the discovered tomb, one that was sealed with more peculiar security than any other, showed stacks of wilted bones - skeletons atop one another as if they'd simply and unceremoniously sank to their knees - and telltale crescent moons on these remains that looked all too much like bite marks; there were scratches on the walls that were, reportedly, "made over a period of several years" (Brooks, 2003). Reports from a conquering Russian party in Siberia (1583) make note of a woman's body preserved in the ice that suddenly revived upon thawing. They, in their desperation, made meal of her flesh and all those who took part in her consumption perished within hours - until they, too (in an ironic twist of fate), revived and, aggressive, hungered for more flesh.

The signs were always there - they just never thought it would escalate to the point that it did. Yet perhaps, it was only ever going to be a matter of time.

It started with urban legends in countrysides of countries that could be easily forgotten, easily dismissed as unimportant. Such occurrences never happened to countries that didn't _deserve it_ , some few privileged folk might dare to say. Not completely glamorous press coverage, yes, but it built from there. Brutal murders of bodies riddled with bullets - corpses found with but empty, bloodshot gazes and gaping mouths as if killed mid-yawn, mid-groan. Reports of men and women showing signs of aggressive, uncompromising "schizophrenia" as they would suddenly go into a frenzy after a fainting spell. When it started growing too much to be riddled as mere legend, there were preachers of the second coming - reasons why this was happening (the sins of everyone who did not agree with them, for one) and who was more to blame, instead of preaching on lessons that taught people how to survive. No wonder not many of them did. 

Medical experts warned of the signs: a radical drop in body temperature, increasingly aggressive behaviour, a tingling that started from the tips of the fingers until suddenly, the victim faints. The heart slows to the point of almost stopping, the head starts to feel too heavy. The victims were notably conscious for a while after they faint (usually during the twenty third hour of infection) but then it was the arms (an itching, unbearable heat that seared beneath the skin that the victims would then viciously claw at) and then the legs. The neck. They then started growling; the frontal lobe gone, the hypothalamus tainted.

That was when you knew they were too far gone for last words.

It was the world the Doctor knew and failed to save, permanently singed into his memory like a cancer that would not stop growing and eating everything alive left in him. He looked upon the scene now and still, he wondered how this all could be. The past played in his head; the gore of yesterday wove with the peace of this place, of this day - like he could see the two, three different realities all at once.

The war wasn't over, not completely, not yet; there were other rumours of people he'd known, gone mad with the beat of endless power's song, with talk of using the disease to conquer everything that was left and remake the new world in a worthier image; for those who fought in it - for every man, woman, and child who'd picked up a weapon - the end will never leave them. He gripped his replenished coffee mug with hands that still trembled in the stillness of the scene and simply looked at the sheer normalcy of it all.

The other patrons of the shop were starting to file out, saluting their goodbyes with something akin to cheer in their tone. Perhaps it had something to do with their bellies filled with warm food and the almost maternal hospitality that this little shop (that was so much more than just a little coffee shop, as it turned out) had to offer.

Tomorrow, as she'd said, happened much sooner than she thought it would. She'd thought he would simply leave after he'd had his fill. She'd heard some stories - he was not one who was likely to stay for very long unless there was trouble. But he didn't.

Activity bustled outside as groups started to walk towards somewhere he did not know. The woman called Shona sat at an empty table as she rest her chin against her palm, her elbow propped up on the table. Clara dusted her flour coated hands against her apron and approached his table once more.

"You _really_ want to know the full story, don't you?"

"I want to know how it's possible, yes."

So she told him. Slowly until it built up to the point that she could not stop.

Rumours turned reports of the sickness that was only too quickly conquering the world spread to the point that most developed countries were able to prepare for it. Somewhat. Schools, especially, were among some of the safer strongholds in metropolitan areas during the earliest days.

They were well stocked with the most rudimentary medical supplies as well as enough food to last through the total chaos of the first days. Though it was not public knowledge, schools in the area were also equipped with enough weapons and ammunition when the government and the military first decided to take the rumours of the outbreak seriously. The teachers were then tasked of acting as the carers for the frightened students and neighbouring families and civilians that had gathered in the schools' walls, waiting out the worst of it. Only Coal Hill, as far as she knew, survived the first days with a certain sense of order and survived the years then that it had taken to rebuild somewhere to start again.

A few turned within the walls in those first few horrible days; it only made the threat so much more real than it already was; no place was safe now, only safer.

These were the things she told him and throughout her tale, he was mostly still. The talk of weapons surrounding children had him biting the fingernail of his right thumb. But there were things that she did not tell him either, like how it was somewhat easier for her to keep the calm within the school with the aid of someone who had a military background and a presence that could command a room half as well as she could. And there were things that she would not have to tell him, apparently, as he would soon be able to put some of the pieces together.

Soon being as soon as two teenagers came in through the door.

The bell rang and a silence settled over the shop. Clara and Shona shared a wary look as the pair of them both started to rise from where they sat. The former, rest against the counter's side; the latter, taking one of the few remaining loaves from the stacks and breaking it in two. The bread was offered wordlessly to the children and they were received with just as much silence, tucked away just as quickly. The girl with bushy, curly hair that was just starting to grow back again - as most of the women did have to shear off their hair for their own protection (less to grab on to, a necessary precaution) - had her arms crossed with her eyes trained upward, her lips in a pout while she ground her teeth. The boy who looked only too much like her, though he was the taller one of them now by just a fraction of an inch, that he could only be her younger brother stood next to her. His were shy hands, held like a choir boy in hymn, against his chest.

"Hi, Clara," said the boy, finally breaking the silence.

"Artie," she said by way of greeting. Her schoolmarm lilt of command had melted and her voice turned quieter, softer. The Doctor couldn't see it for she had her back turned to him now but she was smiling. Or was trying to, at the very least, with the hesitant twitching of the side of her bow lips.

"Angie." This girl, she addressed with more guarded reserve. For good measure, the Doctor could suppose, as the girl rolled her eyes and was decidedly looking anywhere else but at Clara and did not respond.

"We're, uh- still looking for dad," started Artie. The boy looked as if he knew where the two women stood with each other and the air around them was heavy with all their history left unspoken and unwillingly remembered only all too vividly. It was clear that his sister would very much want to be anywhere else but there. Angie was not shy in her almost palpable loathing. Her brother continued, "we volunteered to go on the next SRR again at dawn."

"The roster for that was finalised last night," Clara replied, the tone of a headmistress slowly worming back with the statement. "You two weren't on-"

"I know," he interrupted. "But I asked Captain Smith if we could go since he's leading with Dr. Holloway instead and-"

"Grace?" She intended to raise a brow and so both then shot upward. Expectant. "Isn't Martha due to lead this time-"

"Oh, oh!" Shona quipped, though muffled, from behind the counter. They all looked at her. Her mouth was stuffed with bread. Nobody noticed that she'd taken to snacking to a small piece she'd broken off another one of the remaining loaves. It was hardly intelligible but Clara was only all too adept at decoding her associate's language. "I meant to tell you earlier! Sorry. Got a message about Dr. Jones's still being on the negotiations so we're a _bit_ undermanned since they're still going on about that whole thing with UNIT mucking about with our inventories and them all finally deciding to poke their heads round with the rest of us common folk-"

"Shona."

Clara gave her a look. The blonde could only shrug her shoulders, bewildered, until she realised what she'd been saying. She forced the food down her throat in a harsh swallow.

"Wha- Oh! Shit. _Right._ Sorry, ma'am. I mean- _Clara._ Ozzie? Y'know, like we're mates and all 'cause-"

" _Shona._ " A warning now, clear as day.

"I think I smell something burning..." She made a show of nearly aggressively smelling the air. Freshly baked bread's aroma still wafted through the air. New loaves were just about done, though the timer had yet to go off, but she'd claimed fire all the same. Shona stuffed the rest of the bread in her mouth as she started to back away. "Definitely burning, I'm just to go- _Yeah_."

The other woman all but ran back to the kitchen. She bent and listened through the wood of the door that had flapped to a close behind her.

"Captain Smith," said Clara again, after that little display, as she brushed her palms (slowly getting more and more damp with sweat) on her apron - pressing harder than she might have usually done. "So you want to go with Mickey's lot going West, yeah?"

"Uh huh. We weren't put in the roster because it _did_ just happen. We just got permission now and so we haven't got our-"

"Going to need a lot more than just your say so to give an okay for the ration packs, you know how it is-"

Her rejection was one with genuine remorse that none could deny it. Angie started cracking her knuckles and bit her tongue as her little brother continued to plead.

"We've still got full magazines, it's not that, it's just the food and-"

"Artie, I can't allow this-"

"But Clara, _please_ -"

"You already went past Chiswick _last time_ -"

"Oh fuck off, Clara, you're not our mum!" Angie bellowed, interrupting with all the loud, vindictive hatred that a still grieving nineteen year old girl could muster.

Clara knew the tone. The bitterness of grief and the acidic taste of anger on her tongue still visited when loneliness lingered in her bones during days when the night was dark and the sheets beside her were too cool with the presence of all her ghosts. She might as well have been sleeping in a cemetery. The room, very suddenly, felt a bit colder and quite a bit tighter to everyone inside after that exclamation. Like a ticking time bomb was just unearthed and there was no way out or to defuse it. How it hissed.

"Angie-" she tried to say but the girl would have none of it.

" _I'm_ his legal guardian now, not you, and I say we go."

"These runs don't work like that, there's a roster for-"

"Just give us what we need so we can go alread-!"

" _Angie._ " Clara grew more and more stern with every interruption. Calm as she might try to be, her composure was only beginning to ruffle at trying to still play both mother and some kind of soldier at the same time. "You know full well the stocks are limited for a _reason_ -"

"Oh, yeah fucking right-"

"I'm still not letting you go-"

"I'm an adult now, I can do what I want!"

"As far as I'm concerned, you're still a _child_ -"

"Nobody fucking asked-"

"Stop it-"

"No, you stop being such a fucking dictator and-"

"I can't just-"

"Who the fuck put you in charge anywa-"

" _ENOUGH!_ "

Clara slammed both hands on top of the counter, her yell echoing throughout the room as everyone who could hear (namely the Maitland kids, the Doctor, and peeping Shona who'd opened the door by just a fraction of space) was reduced to simply watching her. A long exhale from her pursed bow lips, this control freak balled her hands into fists. Rigid shoulders. Her nails dug into the skin of her palms. Heat prickled behind her eyes as when she closed them, the memory played for just a fraction of a second - a picture of a memory of the world Clara knew and failed to save.

_It was Angie's voice that rung in her ears all the same - the screams of a pleading girl, years younger than the vindictive young woman she'd become -  begging for a miracle that only too many others like her had prayed for too._

_A woman on her knees, fingers unable to stop from curling like claws but how she'd held her crying children and how they'd held on to her._

_Anita Maitland wept her last tears as she looked at Clara, telling her to take the children._

_'Don't let me hurt them, Oz.'_

_'Annie-' Clara sobbed._

_'There's no time! I know what's happening to me, just do it!'_

_'I can't-!'_

_Trembling fingers so usually controlled. The gun, heavy and cool against her sweaty palms._

_Pressure built in her ears. Weight in the middle of her chest that made her want to sink; something raw building and bubbling up her lungs. Something that tasted like panic._

_There was sweat on her friend's brow. Smoke's fetor odor in the air. Sparks from crackling sudden fires nearby popping, each one sounding more and more like the little girl's screams. There were other noises, there were other fires to put out but these all faded into the ether._

_'You have to,' Anita said as the pain in her limbs started to dull - and she knew what the reports said happened next._

_Her hands, instead of trying to claw the pain away, hastily tried to push her crying daughter away. Her crying daughter who would not part so easily from her doomed mother._

_Angie had thrashed, had demanded to say that they were all mistaken, had begged while her brother could only watch in stunned silence._

_'Do it now, Clara, do it no-' Anita's eyes started to roll to the back of her head, her voice turned guttural._

_No more Anita._

_A single, merciful gunshot rang like an unwanted stepmother._

_Clara's hands shook. Her gun, warm._

_A bloodcurdling scream tainted with all the hysteria that only a grieving fourteen year old girl could muster._

"I'm sorry," she started though her voice still as whole and composed as it could be despite the brief second of a flashing memory. It helped that hers were a liar's lips and a tongue all too used by now to the taste of hunger and deceit that she can swallow it down without flinching, without twitching. She took a deep breath. All war-worn general now. She flexes her fingers still enclosed into fists. Nothing about her breaks (though no one can see how everything of her is broken). "I am _so, so_ sorry but you need to remember your station right now. There are more important things than you or me and you'd do well to remember that you're not the only one of us who's lost someone in this."

A pause.

"You made fucking sure of _that_ , didn't you?" Angie spat. And she took that literally as she then spat on the woman's face to which Clara could only instinctively and swiftly turn her head. Her jaw clenched but she said nothing. With a bare hand, she wiped the spit off her face.

"I'll be outside. The smell of this place makes me _sick,_ " the girl sneered one last time before she turned her heel and went to head for the door.

She pushed it in all her anger and it did not give. Angie groaned and kicked it, only then did she remember that she had to pull it for it to open. Which she then did with more force than was necessary, the bell above almost violently ringing as a result. 

It was quiet for two more awkward beats after the bell's ringing faded into the void as Artie could only watch in the same stunned silence that he had all those years ago. The Doctor did not realise that the mug in his hands was empty of coffee already though he did not remember when he'd drunk it. When he inspected his mouth, it tasted more bitter than he liked. He'd become transfixed by the scene, just now did he notice how implacably stiff Clara held her shoulders and how her hands could not stop fumbling with the cloth of her apron. She exhaled as if she'd just decided on something.

Her head hung low for a moment, her restless hands resting against her hips, as she called to the woman she knew was eavesdropping on the other side of the kitchen door.

"Shona?" Her voice was quieter than it usually was. The woman had the decency to look bashful as she slowly opened the door, popping her blonde head back into the scene. Clara looked over her shoulder and sniffed once. "Think the new loaves are starting to properly _burn_ now."

"Wha- Oh, shit!" 

She ran to the ovens again, the timer softly ringing in the background. Its battery was almost dead.

"She's still going to go," Artie managed to quietly say as he was rather intent to simply stare at his shoes. "With the packs or not."

"I know," she replied. Another pause. Clara exhaled, relenting, and called out again. "Shona?"

The blonde's head popped into sight from the small window after a moment, her nose covered in flour and soot.

"Could you please go to Chang upstairs and get me two ration packs? For under 20s."

Reliable as ever, she nodded and practically skipped away to follow her instructions.

Silence settled again; Clara muttered, "I shouldn't have yelled."

"She was _also_ yelling. And she _did_ yell first."

She managed to smile at that and afforded a quick quaint chuckle under her breath, grateful for the younger Maitland's markedly less temperamental disposition.

"You two doing all right?"

"Fine enough. I really did get permission from Captain Smith, though."

"Did you really?" she quirked her brows again, smirking ever so slightly. A joke of a rebuke at this point.

"Yes! Promise!" Artie nodded, eager and genuine. "He's been teaching me survival things. It's very, very interesting. Angie too but she doesn't like him very much. She doesn't like anyone much except me but I think she only likes me because she _has_ to."

"Trust me, Artie. Nobody has to like anyone." A beat. She tapped her foot. "SRRs are dangerous. You don't need me to tell you that. Mickey'll be very busy so don't get yourself into too much trouble looking for your dad."

"I won't."

"I'm really sorry-"

"It's okay, Clara." He smiled, a dimple burrowing into his cheek. She could remember a time when she was the one who towered over him and not the other way around. "She'll come around sooner or later. I think."

"I don't count on it. And I don't blame her for it either." Clara looked out what she could from the glass panes of the front door and the only evidence of Angie still being there was the sight of her leather jacket. "You take care. And take care of her, yeah?"

"I promise."

Shona came out the kitchen's door with two identical plastic bags filled with a few necessities. A specially prepared iodine solution in a small bottle. Five cans of sardines in each bag as well as three packets of instant noodles. A tiny packaging of paracetamol. Two bottles of water. A blanket. Batteries, a small torch on a keychain, and bandages. A fully loaded magazine for a standard Glock 19. She handed the bags to Clara which she then slid across the counter top. Artie took one and stuffed it into his backpack.

"I don't think I can do this a third time," Clara told him as he went about with putting his own rations aside. "It wouldn't be fair and it's a fragile system enough as it is."

"I think she just needs just one more look," he replied, light and naïve. "I don't think we'll find him if he's still alive but-"

"Hope's a powerful thing to live for, Artie. Sometimes it's the only thing that keeps us alive." He took the other bag. She crossed her arms against her chest. "Stick with Ace, okay?"

"Which one's Ace?"

"The one with the baseball bat. You'll know her when you see her."

"Thank you, Clara." He surprised everyone in the room when he rushed to the other side of the counter, backpack bouncing against his back as he did, and gave her a hug. She held him just as tightly, patting him on the back. "For everything," he added.

"Be careful, okay?"

"We will." Artie moved towards the door but looked back, raised his hand and waved. "Bye!"

From there, they could see how Angie snatched the bag from his hand and darted off without ever looking back as her little brother trailed behind her. Shona took another handful of bread from the loaves still left on display and nibbled on it. A bit stale now, yes, but good enough.

"I _really_ hope I don't end up regretting this," Clara murmured.

"They'll be fine," Shona quipped, taking another bite from her handful of bread.

"Don't you have utensils to sterilise or something?" Clara never faced her but did turn her head just so. A ghost of a smile on her lips. 

"Oh, yeah! On it!"

Stuffing the rest of the bread into her mouth - thereby resulting into chipmunk cheeks - Shona rushed back once more to the kitchens where she would, presumably, spend quite a while in this time. Clara shook her head and ran her still flour-covered hands through her brown hair, flecks white like snow then making patches of it look paler. She sighed, her shoulders drooped, as a single tear ran against her (also) flour coated face. It was when she raised a hand to wipe it away when she took note of the presence at the corner of her eye. He was still there - watching intently, intensely with frowning brows (like some kind of predatory owl) - and he was still. The Doctor looked at her and she caught his gaze; neither of them looked away from the other's stare. Her shoulders turned rigid and she straightened her spine once more.

Clara Oswald was not one to be turned bashful so easily, no, but how the flushing heat rose to her rounded cheeks that try to cough and chuckle the scene away. She raised a hand to scratch the back of her neck, tingles running up her spine as she walked back to the booth where he was still sat. He edged to the side to give her room but still said nothing as he only clutched his still empty coffee mug. She sat next to him, both elbows propped against the table, and she rubbed her palms against her face.

The silence between them, unlike all the others that had passed in the last ten minutes, were not quite as uncomfortable; he did not seem to want to talk and neither did she. He only watched her with those ceaselessly blinking blue eyes and waited as she was almost certainly going to say something.

"Do you have children?" she managed to say. Clara didn't look at him as she was staring at the spot where the Maitland children stood just moments ago. It was just the pair of them now in this unlikely coffee shop, if you didn't count Shona in the kitchen or some fellow named Chang upstairs who apparently prepared ration packs for SRRs. (He didn't. He barely remembered anyone's name.)

"No," he lied, out of instinct. She gave him a look, practically daring the truth out of him with those brown eyes that glistened like they wanted to cry but she wasn't crying. (Wouldn't let herself cry.)

"Not anymore," he added in a grumbling, acquiescent confession. He looked away.

"What were their names?" 

The question seemed to have rattled him as he stared at her once more. Quick with words he could not quite predict. He blinked. He willed the words to come to his lips, for the memory of his children to resurface in his mind's eye. It took effort but he was able to do so, after a moment of contemplation.

"Sam was my oldest. Samwise," he recalled. Why he was telling her all of this, he didn't know. But he spoke as the memories came and she waited for him to finish. "And Jenny. Wife named him, I named her. He, uh- Sam. He had a daughter. Susan."

"But you said you didn't-"

"I don't," he said before she could finish her question; they both knew how it was going to end the moment it started. "Like I said. _Not anymore._ "

Another pause. He coughed.

"The shouty one-"

"Angie?"

"She's very angry."

"Nothing gets past you, dunnit?" She tried for a smile. Too used were her muscles to the action that there was hardly any difference between a sad smile and a proper one. It was in the eyes, perhaps, but even then, hers were ones that glistened with multiples. Like there were universes of emotion in her tiny human shell. He did not respond to her joke but she was ever undeterred. She shrugged. "Yeah, she's been like that since her mum died."

"Did she-"

"Yep. Really early on."

"And did _you_ ... ?"

He didn't have to elaborate. She looked at him and took note that he was not scowling at her. There were no harsh lines betwixt his brows and he regarded her with a look that was practically soft. A shared sympathy; an understanding. That he, too, knew the burden of having been the one to pull the trigger.

"That obvious?" Clara gave him a humourless smile that did not quite reach her still shining eyes. Heart still heavy but ever the beast, it beat on.

"She asked me to," she went on to say. "I'd known Annie, their mum, since secondary school. I babysat them a lot when they were growing up I was practically their nanny. Artie didn't really understand what was going on when she turned; he was barely ten then and it had only just begun. Early days, like I said, but I was staying with them then when Class 4 finally broke out. Angie, well- she begged me not to, thought there was still a way to save her. It was a nightmare, getting them to the school after it all."

"The father?"

"Don't know. He was gone before the announcement went out. Never saw him again."

"Why are they going west?"

"They used to live in Chiswick. I think, maybe, she's hoping they might find him back home."

"They won't find him."

"I know. But who am I to tell her to stop hoping that she might?" 

He considered that for a spell and her lips twitched. Pleased with herself for having had rendered him speechless for even just the briefest of moments.

"You said she wasn't the only one who lost someone," was what he brought up next.

"Picked up on that, did you?" She smiled. Sad but still smiling, something that still puzzled him. "And besides, who of us left hasn't?"

"I'm sorry," was all he could say.

"So am I," was all she could reply.

He brought the mug to his lips and tried to drink. The sound of a man sipping an empty mug filled the air but he only looked at it, the frown lines between his angry brows coming back once again. She shook her head as she rose from her seat without another word. The coffee pot had about half a mug still left in it and she poured it into his mug. It had gone cold by then, yes, but neither of them particularly cared. He didn't complain. It was too black and too bitter to the taste but he drank it anyway.

"I thought you said there wasn't anyone in charge?" he asked after a long, thoughtful sip.

"Yeah, well- at end of a really bad day, most of us just kind of want our mums and dads. We never stop wanting them either."

"And is that what you are? To them? To everyone? You're everyone's mum?"

She cringed. "I prefer carer."

"They, uh- they said something about, what was it called? An SRR?"

"Supplies and Rescue Run. We send out scouting parties for- well, you know. It's in the name. Supplies. And if any survivors need rescuing, we bring them back here."

"What's there to find west?"

"They reached Heathrow last time. Took them about a week to get mobile and get back here. Reckon there's still loads of stuff they must've missed. They might push it to Maidenhead this time around. We've got another team heading up north today too."

"This sounds like something that the government should be doing."

"We can't all wait around for someone else to save us. And to be fair, there's not quite a lot of us left, is there?" Another long sip of silence from him. She tapped her fingers on the table until her question bubbled from her lips. "You were with the government, right?"

"No," he answered quickly with an audible gulp of his too unpleasantly cold, too bitter coffee.

"But you worked with UNIT. Journey said-"

"I was on loan." He finished his coffee, bitterness running down his throat. "When it first started, they recruited me. I'd been trying to develop a cure."

Clara might have asked for him to expound on that - prodded with notably sensitive tact - but the pair of them were soon disturbed by the unmistakable yelp of someone falling over themselves and the clash and clang of silver and plastic ware tumbling from clumsy shoulders that soon followed.

"I'm fine!" was the muffled yell that came from the other side of the door. Clara stood from where she was sitting, shaking her head and smiling though there was still something sad in her eyes. How she did that was the next thing he was determined to discover. As she stood, since he'd already finished his coffee, so did he. He settled his katana on his shoulders once more.

"When will I see you again?" she asked once they were out of the booth.

"Soon, I expect. Or later," he shrugged. "One of those."

She nodded and walked towards the door when he simply stood next to the booth. There was something else he'd wanted to say but didn't and he stood there, biting his fingers, until he remembered. She was just about to go to the kitchen when he spoke again.

"Books," he said. 

Clara turned around, all puzzled brows and pressed lips. "I'm sorry?"

"I've got books," he continued. "The, uh- The building I'm staying in. It's one of the government's reserves. Nobody paid attention to them so I kept them. They're in my quarters. I could... bring some over? Would books be okay?"

She was doing it again, he thought. All multiple emotions at the same time in those brown eyes that were far, far too big for their own good. Amused and fond, surprised and impressed. Something wistful there, too, if he knew how to read her, and her shoulders (ever so slightly) dropped. That was definitely a proper smile on her lips this time, though.

"Books'd be great, yeah. Don't think any of us have had a decent story in a while."

"And paint," he added.

He was definitely not scowling anymore and, if she knew how to read him, she might say he was shy to even suggest it. Nervous. So she pressed on.

"Paint?"

"If- if there's paint, I could... paint? The walls," he gestured with flicking wrists. "This is your headquarters, isn't it?"

"For lack of a better word, I guess."

"It could use a bit of colour," he countered, flippant.

"Doctor, are you saying you want to help us?" 

She was facing him now, hand on her hip and weight shifted to one side. He decided just then that when she grinned, the dimple on her cheek was infuriating beyond belief. He wanted to see it again though he would not say it. Could not say it. The Doctor looked away, his thin lips pursed together. That only made her properly beam up at him - an actual, proper grin.

"Better than waiting to die, I suppose."

He shrugged, not looking at her. She nodded, looking up at him for a quiet moment until he did. Her grin sobered some but there was something that looked like triumph glistened in her eyes that hadn't cried. And something else that looked like gratitude.

"That's better. I'll be seeing you, then."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zombie facts were taken from various bits and pieces of zombie-related literature I've acquired over the years. Max Brooks' "The Zombie Survival Guide" is to be credited for the "no place is safe, only safer" line. I can only wish I were that clever.
> 
> In terms of this chapter's epigraph, I recently read an analysis as to why Plath's poem "Daddy" might be about her mother instead of her father and so the themes + feel of the poem is kind of what I used as inspiration for Angie in this one. The more you know, I guess.
> 
> Slowly building up the flow and plot to the story so that's fun to do but this is very much a work in progress and so if you have any suggestions or questions or characters you might like to see appear (if they're not already planned in) or prompts ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) that you maybe would like to see from this verse and piece, I'd be happy to hear them! Glad to know some of you are enjoying the tale so far and I can't wait to unveil the dastardly plans I've got set up in upcoming chapters. ;)
> 
> Comments & such make me happy and I would so very much love to know what you think of the story! <3
> 
> All my love,  
> Jo x
> 
> P.S. Special thanks and shoutout to Carrie, Allie, and Izzie (they all rhyme... conspiracy pls!!!) for their invaluable input on this chapter. <3


	4. Chapter 4

“ _The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty – we all have it.”_

\- Libby Day, Dark Places by Gillian Flynn 

* * *

 

_Blood._

_Covered in it, like the day he was born – like they all were._

_Is this what it meant to be born again?_

_Only his son neither kicked nor screamed this time; he only stared with those open, dead eyes – as grey as an oncoming storm._

_Red burst from his open throat; was it still warm as it congealed against his pale, cold skin?_

_All he could do was stand there and stare – all shivering spine and hardly any fight left to his still beating heart – at the terror that he saw beyond the image of his son._

_Chewing._

_Moving._

_Then came a strangled, garbled sound – like a child’s first cry after its exodus from its mother’s womb._

_Born again was right._

 

The Doctor woke.

Breath, heavy in his chest, like he was inhaling smoke from a forest fire but it was the only air left in a world reduced to ashes. Sweat ran down from his temples, he rested a hand against his chest and felt his own heartbeat. Every beat hurt (his chest, too tight) but it fought, valiant and Sisyphean, to keep him alive.

 _The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s_ , he read somewhere once,  _and the body shrinks from annihilation._

Where was he? Where was this place?

Thin fingers, calloused and cold, rubbed life into his red-rimmed eyes that, for a moment, saw nothing but black and white static. There were new scratches all over him – angry and raw; just a bit more and he might have split skin. Again. His knuckles were still bruised, though healing. A stiff pain made itself known at the side of his neck; it hurt to turn his head even just so. He groaned. That was what happened, he supposed, when you pass out without any semblance of grace in a sofa that was far too small to shelter your gangly limbs and sharp angles. Seconds later, colour started to flow back into his vision though dark spots still danced when he looked into any light.

Brown was the first thing that registered – frayed and hastily taped together (overlapping blacks and beiges) – and the word  _box_  followed soon after. Cardboard. The words “fragile” and “this side up”, stamped and red and faded, displayed at the sides. Upon inspection, there were books inside. There were more titles scattered around its radius but, for some reason, it was evident that he’d been in the process of packing books before he’d unceremoniously succumbed to slumber. It took him a moment to remember why.

He shifted from the couch and a title fell from his lap. Pages, yellowed and worn, and its soft cover had a rather large part of it torn away. The title could only be barely made out:  _The Myth of Sisyphus_  and other essays by Albert Camus. Without thinking, he packed it up. Next to it, he noticed, was a smaller book though in much of a similar state; Marcus Aurelius, it read.  _Meditations._   _A little flesh, a little breath, and a reason to rule all – that is myself._  It was a box of moderate size and where he found it, he could not recall.

He licked his thin, dry lips; he ran a hand against his cheeks, his chin. Rough to the touch where stubble grew. He licked his lips again and the vague aftertaste of good, sweet coffee made itself known as it had lingered on his skin from the day before. Had it only just been a day? How many hours ago had it been? He pressed his lips together, rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth for friction, and swallowed what coffee-flavoured spit he could make.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.

He packed more books into the box until the flaps could not shut the box completely.  _That should be enough_ , he thought. It should be enough for the day, at least.

He bit the nail of his thumb, his forefinger rubbed absentmindedly against the stubble on his cheek while his other fingers scratched by the line of his jaw. The skin there stretched and sagged, he found. Dirt and dead skin and scabs of all sizes from wounds he could not remember gathered on his nails when he looked. He scraped them against the gap between his teeth to clean them. Scratched again. Repeat.

All the while, the scene replayed in his head.

It was not a simple dream that visited him, no. It was a memory. His son, his first born, splayed on the bed with limp limbs with a faraway gaze, wrapped in a blanket of his own blood. The image burnt but his eyes did not water – there was more terror in the memory that he wanted to remember so he froze it like icy poison in his veins. He tasted coffee on his tongue.

The Doctor moved.

Willing himself from the couch, he focused his thoughts on the things that he had to do and nothing else but these most rudimentary tasks.

He washed his face (as best he could) – the cold water felt good against his skin, at least – and changed his clothes. Plaid trousers (how many pairs _were there_ in this pile?), a white shirt that he knew was a little too tight – it had a beetle on it, overexposed against the image of a skull (he liked it for some reason that he could not quite point out) – and the same fleece-lined zip-up jumper as the day before. Katana, strapped to his shoulders; magazines, tucked into his back pockets; handguns, hidden away in the pockets of his jumper. He rubbed his chest and felt the metal of his flat’s key through the fabric of his shirt. All that was left was the hefty box; he picked it up.

The walk from the reserve building where he stayed to the impossible café went by much quicker than before. Was it because he had a destination this time and was not just wandering about, half starved? Perhaps. Be that as it may, he made his way there all the same, with a clearer head and an end in mind.

There was something different about this walk, though. His firm, decided attempts to think of anything else but the images that he saw in his mind’s eye made him look at where he was going – and pay closer attention to the things around him.

The scene had not changed – and he knew many of them, over the years.

Streets littered and covered with mountains upon mountains of discarded, rotting corpses (some of them, headless) and rubbish that no one found use in cleaning up after anymore. Styrofoam containers, empty plastic bottles, used plastic cutlery lodged themselves into drains. Signs on storefronts were long since faded but he knew what might have been there before – clothes boutiques, pawnshops, furniture stores, specialty bakeries, little offices for would-be entrepreneurs, drug stores, and the like. A fucking McDonalds, maybe, or even a Costa’s. There was more dried blood on cement and asphalt than there was paint. Wrappers of sweets and dried autumn leaves and balled up, crumpled missing children posters rolled and scattered with every breeze.

The United Kingdom had it easy, though, in direct contrast to other countries.

There was the mayhem, of course, that came with this one and that; arguing and fighting and killing over who got to rule over this patch of the world and that. There was the mad scramble of denial in almost every government’s attempts to hide the truth from the public – every known spin tactic, initiated; anyone who said anything about anything, charged with perjury or treason. Most were never heard from again.

The most violent, corrupt countries had populations left in the hundreds, at most. Gangs and monarchies fell within themselves in the first months alone. Corpses with heads bashed in, limbs and intestines left to rot in the open air – scenes like this lost their novelty in the second year or so; they were practically the new kind of litter. It was a man-eat-man world of the most literal sense.

But the thing is – you can only live so long when you all you live for is keeping yourself alive.

The scene had not changed, yes, but as he looked closer – there were the little things that he’d failed to notice because the scene was, in fact, in the process of changing. Little by little. It was the people, of course. The ordinary ones – the regular citizens that most places of government were too busy to control to imagine that they could possibly have a mind of their own (to organise their own communities without prompt, to survive and save themselves) – who took initiative and that surprised him. It was hard to remember the people, he supposed, when the things you put down were once people too.

How do you tell the difference? How do you know who’s worth saving? How do you know when to pull the trigger?

The Doctor looked at them, his pace slow as he carried the box, their faces never quite registering in his mind’s eye but he could see them. There was still the air of them minding their own business – hardly anyone looked up from their own tasks – but there was the indubitable knowledge that he was just barely starting to understand.

These people were  _helping_  each other – they were actually helping.

There were people pushing a car to a side that had a collection of other vehicles while others took them apart. Oil and gasoline, drained and bottled into makeshift containers; engines and batteries, piled together and tested. There were some who were stacking up plywood that had been used to board up doors and windows. By God, there were children who were even playing. Laughing, smiling, singing. Paper windmills made out of missing person flyers spun in their hands and there was a young woman – bright hair like copper against sunlight – who played with them and looked after them.

Were these all Clara’s people?

He could not help but wonder, still, how this all came to be. It still made no sense. So long had he been with those who saw only the big picture from a distance – talking of people and populations in numbers and statistics and life expectancies, not as individuals who were capable of independent movement or thought. Do not fault him too harshly for that.

In the end of days, he’d been with the military and governmental officials, for the most part. What with all their top of the line research facilities, for he was one of the first (then the lead) scientists who worked to develop a _cure_ , where else would he be?

(His advantage of a  _contained specimen_  helped considerably.)

And he has seen so much of this world – the absolute worst of the worst that this world had to offer and just how outright terrible humans could be – that it started to get easier. The shooting and hacking without thinking, without remorse; it was not out of cruelty or cowardice, after all. It was simply what had to be done. In a world where colours drained and turned muted except for bright, dark red – it was just easier.

It was so easy to be hopeless in a world where there was nothing beautiful left to see.

Yet this was happening before his very eyes – the human race, rebuilding what they destroyed. Baby steps, yes, but they were still moving forward.

Incredible. Impossible. Amazing and wonderful.

The bell rang to announce his entrance and Clara turned her head to look. She flashed him a bright smile without hesitation. He could only blink in return, stilled and too stunned that he hadn’t quite considered that there would be other people in this place aside from her.

“Be with you in a mo,” she said. Smiling like she meant it. Holding a raised finger in the air like a schoolteacher. He just stood there, box in his arms, and did as he was told. She turned her back to him.

“I still think it was aliens…” said the old man sat at the booth that the Doctor had occupied before. There was a red beanie on his head and he sipped a cup of what could be something warm. Coffee, he thought. He could still taste the memory of it on his own tongue. The woman next to him, red hair tied in a ponytail, rolled her eyes, smiled a tired smile, and gave his arm a pat meant to soothe, probably.

“Yeah, gramps. It was the aliens,” said the woman in such a reply that he could only assume that this was the not the first time they have had this conversation.

“I’m just saying, Clara; keep playing favourites like that—”

“I wasn’t playing favourites, all right? She would have died—”

“A _lot_ of people have died.”

“She’s just a child—”

“A lot of children have died. Sorry to be crass but I thought we were trying to keep the ones who are still alive as just that, not just the ones who—”

“Look,” said Clara, cutting the other woman off. She gestured with her hands – hers were restless fingers, palms, wrists that settled against her hip sometimes (but never for very long). She kept a clear tone – level and calm – but exasperation could be read from it. Her shoulders dropped when she sighed and it was only then that he realised that she oft kept them rigid. “Donna, it was just—it was  _personal_ , okay? They’re  _my_  children, or as good as. And they’ve been restless this whole time and they—they need the hope. I tried but I—”

“That’s exactly what playing favourites  _is_ , innit?”

The woman called Donna did not sound unkind – blunt, perhaps, but those were not eyes that accused. She raised a brow and pursed her lips, unimpressed by the brunette’s excuses.

“I’ve already told them I won’t be able to do it again. You can take me out of the ration listing for a month, if you like.”

“You know I won’t.”

“But I’m saying you could.”

“Most of us are grateful to you, love. You’re a good leader, a good woman,” Donna started. Her fingers were twined and she pushed them forward against the tabletop. She looked up at Clara, tilted her head, and continued, “You keep us all in check. God knows how you do it, after everything, but you know how these things go once people start making exceptions.”

“I know. That's not—” Clara raised a hand; thumb, against her temple whilst her fingers rubbed circles against her forehead. She sighed again. When she spoke, she sounded more resigned. “I’m doing my best. I swear I am.”

"You know that Maitland girl's never going to forgive you anyway."

"I don't expect her to," she replied. Clara laid a hand against the table and shifted her weight on her other leg. Her head hung low. "I just want her to not hate me quite as much, I guess. It might make this whole thing a bit easier."

Donna’s brows furrowed in the pause that followed. She reached and rested a hand against the back of Clara’s.

“When was the last time you slept?”

Clara rolled her eyes and scoffed. Tried for a laugh but no one in that room thought it at all sincere.

“I’m _fine_ , mum,” she joked.

“Do I look like someone’s who’s given _birth_?” replied the other, an accepted levity between them. She gave Clara’s hand three pats and then took back her hand. It was then that her gaze flicked to take in the figure standing in the corner, still as a statue with a box of books in his hands. He hadn’t uttered a word and simply watched the exchange in silence. Donna cocked her head in his direction.

“Who’s _that_ then? Is he a new one?”

“Oh, him?” With a hand on her hip, Clara looked over her shoulder to give him a look. There was a dimple on her too-round, too-wide cheeks. She shrugged. “That’s the Doctor.”

“Doctor who?”

“I can hear you, you know,” he quipped, finally.

“Isn’t like I’m trying to keep it much of a secret, am I?” Donna shot him a hard look. “What’s he doing here?”

“Making a delivery, it looks like,” Clara said in response. She turned to face him now, properly. Her bum just against the table and her arms crossed against her chest. She eyed him from head to toe and raised a brow. “Books, yeah?”

“Oh, _brilliant_ ,” Donna complained, “Making me into a bloody librarian now too.”

“Weren’t you already a librarian once?” Clara asked, smirk clear in her tone; her hair swished to the side as she twisted her head just so.

“I was a _temp_ at a library. There’s a _difference_. And that’s not the point, Oswald.” Clara laughed and Donna rolled her eyes. The Doctor’s eyes went back and forth between the two women as if he were watching a tennis match. Donna then went to ask, “Put him in the roster?”

“Don’t know if he’s staying yet,” Clara replied. “I’ll let you know.”

“Donna—” the old man then said. There was a faraway gaze to him, as if he hadn’t been aware of anything else around him. He tugged at the sleeve of Donna’s purple blouse.

“Okay, gramps.” Donna sighed. “Better get him back up.”

“It was nice to see you out of bed, Wilf,” said Clara, a carer’s kind lilt prominent just then in her tone. “Rest up, okay?”

Wilf gave her a small salute and a twitch that gave the promise of a smile but he couldn’t quite follow through with it; his limbs trembled and his steps were slow. Donna had an arm around him as she helped him rise and walk out of the booth. His granddaughter, though patient, still managed to give a few parting words just as Clara was about to attend to the matter that was the Doctor.

“You know I think McCullough’s trying to chat up Chang upstairs,” she said in a tone that could only be described as conspiratorial.

“ _Shona_?” Clara smirked, brows quirked up; the tip of her tongue loosely bit between her teeth. A cheeky grin if the Doctor ever saw one. “You _just_ picked up on that?”

“Don’t know how old Nick’s going to feel about that,” the other woman replied as they shared the look of mischievous amusement. “May just tell him, I might.”

“ _Donna_ …” It was just a name, softly spoken, with her head tilted just so – but the rebuke was there all the same.

“Yeah, yeah. All right, I won’t.” The pair were almost by the door now. “Come along, gramps.”

The Doctor watched them go and so intent was his watching, apparently, that he did not notice Clara’s approach when she did; she only registered in his mind when he felt her hands on the back of his as she took the box from him. Her hands were warm – from the baking, presumably – and soft, if calloused. His were more so but he knew his palms were not nearly as soft as hers.

“You can sit down, Doctor,” she said and gestured to the now emptied booth with a cock of her head. He let her take the box and only in hindsight did he think that it was, perhaps, not in proper etiquette for him to have let her do that. He should have carried it himself and saved her the trouble. But she was already carrying it with no trouble. It seemed silly to ask for it back – and he’d brought it for her anyway. Sort of.

“The loud woman—” he started as he slid into the booth but, again, she cut him off before he could finish. She put the box on the table, picked up Wilf’s own empty mug, and walked towards the coffee maker, as she spoke.

“That’s Donna: resident bookkeeper of sorts, for lack of a better word. And that was her granddad, Wilf.”

Mechanical were her movements as she set the used mug aside and flipped a clean one by the handle – expertly, by the looks of it – and poured coffee into it. One spoonful of sugar came next – and another, and another… eight, all in all. He spoke again once she made her way to him with the coffee and a small bread bun in her hands.

“I brought you these, like you asked,” he said as he gestured to the box.

“For _me?_ ” she smirked.

“For—” He felt heat rise all the way up to his ears. He shifted in his seat. “You said I had to.”

“I did not say _had to_ ,” she said as she handed him the coffee and bread. “I suggested a bit of give and take; you’re not _obligated_ to come back, you know.”

He said nothing in response as he simply started to break the bread apart. He dunked it into the coffee for a few seconds then ate it. A leisurely pace. Not quite as starved as he was before, she was pleased to note.

“Does this mean you’re joining our little family?” she quipped. “I ask ‘cause then we have to put you in the ration list and stuff. Think of it like a chore wheel.”

“You have chores?” he asked, half-chewed, coffee-soaked bread shoved (for the moment) to the hollow of his cheek.

“Yep.” She crossed her arms and let them rest on top of the box. At her height, it was at just the perfect spot that she could even do that comfortably. “We’ve mostly been in clean up and acquisition for the past year and I reckon it’ll be like that for a longer while still. You mentioned painting the last time. This is, by far, the most up and running building we’ve managed to fix up, hence why it’s mostly headquarters. It could use a bit more life into it.”

“I was thinking about that,” he said as he swallowed. “I could—the walls? I was thinking a mural, maybe?”

A pause. Clara considered it.

“I think we can find paint that isn’t too dried up somewhere,” she said, finally. “That’d be nice, yeah.”

He thought he smiled then; she’d say it reached his eyes.

The Doctor ate slowly and in silence as she surveyed the titles that he brought. Clara brightened, he noticed, as she saw the little philosophy book by Marcus Aurelius.

“Oh, my God; I _loved_ this when I was fifteen,” she said. She bit her lower lip to keep herself from grinning; she grinned all the same. “I went through a phase. Had posters of him up on my wall and everything.”

“Of Marcus Aurelius?” he asked, his turn then to raise one of his prominent brows. Every line on his face bore his shared amusement and bemusement. Clara only shrugged.

“I was _that_ girl.”

He resumed to eat and she proceeded to take each title with precious care but sometimes asked him for comment for one or two or several that she had not quite expected from him.

“Doctor, this is a manual for a Windows ’98,” she said, holding up the said manual. “Not exactly great literature.”

He shrugged. She kept digging.

“Murder mysteries?” In her hands was a copy of “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie. “ _Really?_ ”

It was an impressive (if eclectic) collection, one she has not quite seen in a long while. (A lot of the books were discarded and used for bonfire fuel as wood was regarded as a more precious commodity in the worst days.) There was a book or two of philosophy. Several more of poetry and quite a number of pocketbook-sized novels. A few non-fiction titles – manuals, a tourist guide to Myanmar, and a study guide to the GCSEs – were also in the pile. A good haul, all in all.

“I’ve got more at my place,” he said when she finished looking through the box.

“You want me to bring a few people over? Help haul the lot here?”

“It might—attract more attention that way.”

“Government still not too keen on the sharing?”

“No, not so much.” That made her chuckle.

He drank what remained of the coffee when his bread was gone.

“You won’t get in trouble for this, will you?”

“What’re they going to do about it?” he shrugged. “They let me in and out as I fancy because they still need me, I think. Just want to keep me staying put until— I don’t know, whatever it is they’re planning to do with me.”

“Point taken,” she conceded as she proceeded to pack the books back up. “How about just me, then? The transfer’d go by a bit quicker if you’ve got an extra pair of hands, won’t it?”

He was about to respond when the bell rang.

Loudly, vehemently for the door was pushed open with such force that it might have torn the bell from where it was perched. A man came in – dark blue, military-standard coat that swayed as it reached it ankles – with a crazed look in his blue eyes.

“Clara, we’ve got ‘em coming in hot. Toshiko says it’s probably a Class 2, maybe more.”

He sounded American. Clara’s entire demeanour changed. She held her chin up, shoulders back – all five-foot-one of command.

“Where?”

“Canary Wharf.”

“ _Shit,_ ” she swore under her breath, bellowed “Shona!” and then returned her attention to the other man. “Aren’t Rose and John's lot still on duty by that perimeter?”

“I guess one of them lit the beacon, couldn't see who. You know it’s bad if _John’s_ called for help. We gotta move fast.”

“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath. Hands against her hips, she tapped her foot on the floor. The other man looked at her with impatient intent, as if his continued, unblinking looking at her would get her to think faster. Clara then gave her orders, swiftly spoken (she gestured all the while) and not a hint of hesitation. “Three snipers, four on the ground for the front line. Leela’s not with Mickey’s SRR, right? Get me her. Ten in pairs of two on standby for backup and requisition. I want Rory to head medical. For everything else, just pull in who you can. Go to Perkins. Four vehicles – motors, preferable – for the front line. Faster that way. Back here in 5.”

“You got it, boss,” he replied and gave a salute before he ran back out. The bell rang with the same boisterous, ominous ring as it did before as the blonde woman came tumbling in from the flapping door.

“We’ve got a Class 2 at Canary Wharf,” Clara told the blonde the moment she set eyes on her. “I need three more L115A1s. Ammo packs for ten and I want two sets of throwing knives. Go!”

Shona did not need to be told twice as she nodded and ran back from where she’d come. The Doctor only watched, though his posture dictated that he was ready to be given his orders as soon as she remembered he was still there. He looked just about ready to leap.

“You good to go with that thing?” she asked, finally turning her head back to him. She gestured with her chin to the katana that was strapped to his shoulders still.

“What’s going on?” he asked, eyes wide and alert.

“Friends are in trouble. Class 2 horde’s more than fifty but less than a hundred. _Are you good to go on that thing?_ ” she pressed, speaking more swiftly with every syllable. Hardly a hint of the cheerful, genial woman he’d known her to be remained in her stance then – she was all seasoned general; like a mother who’d just found out her children had been threatened.

“Wouldn’t carry it if I wasn’t,” he replied.

“Good. Borrowing you, then.” _Bossy, this one,_ he thought. “Gear up. You okay on the front lines?”

“To maximize ammo?”

“Isn’t like we’re running on an unlimited stock.”

An appreciated moment of levity as, though exasperated, she managed a hint of a smile for him.

She licked her lips and peeled off the dried skin there with her teeth. Clara chewed on her lip then; her hands on her hips still; her fingers tapped and dug into the fabric of her dress that she could feel the pressure on her skin. The Doctor rose from his seat and went to the window – outside, there were others who were starting to run as the man who’d come in was barking her orders. They’d dropped everything as soon as he spoke and they followed suit.

“That’s Captain Jack,” she said. He found her standing next to him, looking at the scene as if she’d seen it all before. Part of him wondered why, if there were people like him and Donna who were a part of this “little family” as Clara had so fondly called them, she (in particular) seemed to be in charge of this whole operation. Why was it that it was to _her_ to whom they consulted and reported?

"He said something about a beacon being lit?" he asked. Though there were other questions he wanted to ask, he has also been in situations only too much like this one where there was only so much that you could focus on. There was a time and place for his questions – and for some reason, he could tell that it would take more of the former and a lot of trust for her answer with a modicum of truth.

"You know Lord of the Rings? Like the beacons of Gondor?" His brows furrowed in questioning but she did not wait to see if he knew the reference to which she was alluding. "It's a bit like that. A plead for help. Either means they're outmanned or just out of firepower. Canary Wharf’s with a team of ten as far as I can remember; can take on a Class 1, easy, especially with Rose and John? Two of the best, meant to survey the area to see if it was ready for the branch out. If they’ve lit the signal, they’re in serious trouble. Class 2 at _least_."

"So where's Minas Tirith?" he asked after a moment.

"This  _is_  Minas Tirith."

"Smart."

"Is that a compliment?" she threw him a look that, despite it all, was still cheeky.

"An observation," he deadpanned. Not that that was a deterrent for her in the least.

It was then that Shona burst from the door, rounds of ammunition and two rifles on her shoulders. Behind her was a bespectacled man that the Doctor was fairly certain he’d never met before. This new man held another rifle, two belts adorned with small makeshift blades, and more ammo packs that the one called Shona could not carry by herself, he could only assume. Clara was quick to address them, never missing a beat, as she helped them unload the gear onto the counter.

"Shona, I need you to check on Donna upstairs, she'll manage here. Then go to Amy, tell her to put the kids in lockdown until we get back. Do the rounds. We'll need a bonfire after this so get a team together to get it ready." She turned then to the spectacled man as she reached for a rifle beneath the counter. “Chang, you’re next in line for CMO after Rory; get prepped.”

The pair of them nodded and did as they were told. Clara, on the other hand, set to work with her own firearm with swift, careful precision. Magazine, still full, she pocketed two more clips from an ammo pack instead and swung it around her shoulder.

“You need anything?” she asked him just as Jack and the others came in and started their own preps without need of further instruction. The Doctor shook his head, lips pursed, and looked as if he were forcing himself to breathe.

“You sure you’re up for this?” she asked.

“Isn’t me you should be worrying about, Clara.”

The café he’d come to know in the two times he’d been here – this, of course, being the second – was soon filled with people. Too many faces that had all started to blur together and he could not be bothered to keep up with him that he simply shadowed Clara instead.

“Jack, where’s Perkins?” Clara asked.

“On his way,” he replied. Jack holstered two handguns with magazines, newly replenished. He eyed the Doctor then – a good old fashioned once over, everything in his stance dictating a lasciviousness he did not think could exist in a single human being. “Who’s this guy?”

“He’s with me,” she said, as if that answered everything. “Doctor, Jack; Jack, the Doctor. Save the flirting for later, will you?”

“That a promise?” Jack asked, grinning.

“Got to work for it, Captain.” She winked.

“I love it when you go all Dom on me, Oz.” He returned the gesture.

The Doctor frowned at them both.

They filed out as soon as everyone was armed and loaded. Outside, there were several motorbikes that were being pushed – as she’d requested – and a van (broken windows, barely repaired with cellophane and masking tape) that followed just behind them.

“Clara, ma’am,” said the man who set up her bike. On his head was something that resembled a newsboy cap from the 1950s. The man called Perkins, he thought. “Old Bessie’s still taken a bit of a beating from the last time, couldn’t make her out in time—”

“Not a problem. This’ll get us from A to B, won’t it?” Clara grinned at him. He tipped his hat to her and backed away as the rest of them boarded their respective vehicles. Most of them seemed to already know their designated partners and vehicles – remarkably organized (though, to their credit, they have been a team for more than a year or two, he had to remember).

“Clara—” he started but when she threw him a look (this, she did as she swung a leg over the bike – and it was only then that he decided what a peculiar sight this is; her hair was short and glossy with grease, like she hadn’t washed it in two days; she wore leggings, a plaid, blue pinafore and a patched up yellow jumper, and heeled biker books [anywhere else, she might have passed for a sweet little schoolteacher, if it weren’t for the fact that she was armed with military-grade weapons {rifle strapped to her shoulder, handguns on her sides, and a belt of knives around her waist}] and he looked and blinked at the sight), he found he could not remember what he was going to ask her.

“Get on,” she said. Gestured with a cock of her head to the space behind her bike.

He did not to be told twice. She revved the engine to life once he was on and he barely had time to hold on to her with his arms wrapped around her waist before she was off before anyone else, though the rest of them followed just a few seconds after.

The streets – once again, he noted – were more of the same. And this was a scenario with which he was already familiar. There was that rush that built in the middle of your stomach, the anticipation for the fight that rose up your throat like acidic aftermath of a lunch you had two weeks ago, the anxiety that made you wonder if your heart felt like it was going to beat out of your chest or if it had stopped beating altogether.

The Doctor did not know if it was quiet in the streets or not; all he could hear was the roar of the motor’s engine and the beat of his heart in his ears. He felt the heat from the engine penetrate through the material of his boots.

That was one thing he could say for the end of the world, though. The traffic was remarkably less congested. It had something to do with the fact that instead of billions of people in the world – there were now but a million or two. Maybe less. A count has not yet been made. They smoothed past the mostly cleared out streets – work of Clara’s people, he knew now – and the motor beneath them purred under her capable hands.

The first shot rang past his ears – he did not know how long they had been on the road but it made a sound like a surprise round of thunder. His hold on her waist tightened as the bike whined for she took a sharp turn that skidded it to a sudden halt. He blinked into the distance and saw it – the first of the horde just coming into view. The Doctor looked up and, sure enough, there was Canary Wharf. A fire roared from the topmost part of the building, a large portion of the windows chunked away – there were the remnants of a crashed helicopter that peeked from the wreckage.

“Snipers, draw back!” Clara called out. When did he part from her and from the bike? The Doctor didn’t know but he did see another one of the undead drop to the ground – a knife protruding from its skull. He afforded a look behind him and there was a woman, knives in her hands, with an intense stare that he could only describe as feral.

“Go high – cover those of us on the ground. Backup and rescue – find Rose’s lot, arm the ones still alive, and give these things hell!”

“All right, you heard the boss!” Jack hollered, a handgun in each hand as he shot every undead head he saw still standing. “Go, people; go, go, go!”

Canary Wharf was a battleground with more wreckage – there were still cars trapped in a broken down gridlock. Fires burst from boarded up windows. There were screams from directions that he could not pinpoint – but this was not a scenario where you overcomplicated things. This was not the time to philosophise; there was only instinct – to save and survive – and it roared in this team now, never flinching at the prospect of a kill.

He never liked to think of them as zombies.

It sounded made up, like a tale told to young, impressionable, mischievous young folk to trick them into not making too much trouble. But it was hard to think of them as anything but exactly that. They groaned and growled with gaping mouths, blood and spit dripping all over them but none of them cared. They, too, were driven now by sole instinct – to eat – and in the end, is that not what they were reduced to?

For a man of his somewhat more advanced age, it was perfectly acceptable to find it difficult to imagine him as sprightly and strong but he was. Oh, he was. There was a fire in him – there was a deliberate viciousness as he swung his sword with expert, graceful skill. Not a grunt came from him; there was no joy in his intensely intent eyes. Only fire. He left body after fallen body in his wake – heads rolling clean off.

He kept his lips firmly pressed and his legs pushed him forwards and sideways and backwards like some kind of dance – he slid past bloodied car hoods to escape the clutch of those who drew too near. If one got too close – and that was a rarity – he found a bullet would catch it straight in the head.

They swarmed towards him and this was odd, he would later think upon in hindsight. Zombies did not swarm – they were not an intelligent species that hunted in groups. Hordes happened when there were too many of them in a single area with limited food supply, yes, but they were not concentrated like this. They did not hunt; they did not have the cognitive capability to be able to stalk prey and attack only after consideration and in strong numbers. Together.

They were not predators – they were _parasites_. So what was going on?

There was no time to consider the implications of that as chaos erupted all around him. Shots rang and they kept ringing in his ears. Not once did he let go of his sword as he only swung and beheaded them. Swing, behead, repeat.

A limbless woman in a tattered dress approached him and all it took was a swing. But there was something on her neck that caught his eye – were those sparks? _wires_? – and he stopped for but a second before the growl registered about a second close to too late.

It lunged for him – as did another from the back – but before they could administer a bite, blood spattered from the back of their skulls. Brain matter flew spectacularly from the force of the rifle’s shot and when he turned to look, he saw Clara aiming in his direction. She took another shot and a thud came to the ground as another one of them fell by her hand. Then it was her who did not see the approaching figure to her left. The Doctor did not hesitate; his hands were swift upon his own gun. Swiftly taken out of the safety lock, he fired.

One shot, two shots, three shots.

He shoved an elbow to the middle of one of the things that very nearly got him but he sidestepped and, with one hand, he expertly spun his katana and took its head clean off. Farther along, he saw Clara throw a knife from her belt that hit its target square on the forehead and it dropped without ceremony. Others fought alongside him and bodies kept dropping, kept rolling but they all just kept going.

The fight was not over – but it can only be described for so long. The horde thinned out considerably after around ten minutes into the fight – another ten minutes, and they were about cleansed that the group could breathe again.

They lost two of the people in backup; one person in Rose and John’s team had fallen before they got there; another four had been bit.

They had 20 hours for final rites, as was their protocol before the virus made them faint and fall into a sleep like death. Another hour and they would wake – two hours then, they would suffer the ice in their veins that burnt. Two of them had refused the rites and wanted it done swiftly – the man called John told them that he was sorry. The Doctor handed him the sword – save the ammo, he recalled – and John made quick work of it. Not a word said in passing, then, as he returned the bloodied sword to its owner.

The Doctor moved away then and he looked for Clara. She unhooked the belt – two blades left – and passed it to the woman called Leela, if he were to ask who she was. He didn’t. This woman simply gave a quiet nod and went off to look for the knives that were lodged into dropped skulls.

“You okay?” she asked. Clara had met him halfway when she saw him in her line of vision. Her face was stained with sweat and grime and wiped away blood (not her own), and she looked up at him. Her eyes were wide; pupils, dilated from adrenaline. There was a smile in her features – in her eyes, specifically – but it did not reach her tired lips. Even though they tried. “I saw you out there. You were  _brilliant_. God, where have you  _been_  all this time?”

He shrugged as he sheathed the katana back into its scabbard. He’ll clean it later, he decided. “Are _you_ okay?”

“Fine, yeah,” she replied, not a beat of hesitation. Flawlessly reported like she’d said it a million times before. “Wouldn’t exactly go on to say _peachy keen_ but you know… Alive, at least.”

“Thank you,” she added. “For helping us.”

“Is anyone—?” he trailed off, not quite sure how to phrase the question.

“We lost two. Lynda and Gretchen,” she admitted. Her gaze drifted far away. Surveyed the surroundings – smoke rose from dying fires and her people rushed to and fro to help with the injured and the fallen. A man came to her and she straightened immediately. Rigid shoulders. Crossed arms against her chest. A standard pose for her, he’d come to notice, whenever she felt like she had to be in charge.

“Rory?”

“Clara, ma’am. You’re going to want to see this.”

He pointed to a heap of heads – decapitated – that they managed to pile together.

“What, what is it—?”

Clara squatted and, using the tip of a handgun, she pushed a head around until it rolled to the side. Attached to the back of its head was a small-claw like contraption. Wires protruded from the ends where it had been severed. There was more to the gadget attached to the body, it could be assumed. A small spark burst from the exposed wires; it made her jump back.

“Oh my stars,” she whispered. “What  _is_  that?”

The Doctor mimicked her position and, as he held his breath, leaned into the decapitated head for closer inspection. It triggered something in his memory – something vague, something he could not quite bring to mind immediately. But he knew it this contraption. In theory, at least. He knew it.

“Transcranial electromagnetic pulses sent directly to the parietal and occipital lobes,” he said by way of explanation.

“What’d you reckon it is?” asked Rory as he kept a cool distance between himself and the two of them who’d taken to peering too closely at the head.

“Wrong,” the Doctor muttered.

“Wrong?” asked Clara.

He drew back and shot a piercing glare at Rory. He snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “You. Question: are _all_ of them like this?”

“Yeah, I think so. Sorry—  _who_  are you again?”

“Rory, not now,” Clara spoke up. Levelheaded, as always, but the requesting command was clearly heard. “Doctor, what does that mean?”

“Like mice in a maze,” he started. He licked his lips. “ _Someone’s controlling them._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Action-driven scenes are the literal bane of my existence. I rarely do them so please have my apologies because they're trash. Also why do my chapters keep getting longer and longer? RIP me. I try to rein myself in, I swear. Woops.


	5. Chapter 5

“ _He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”_ ”

\- John 9:25

 

* * *

  

“It’s him, isn’t it?”

The voice rang like the distant _bong! bong! bong!_ of a time long ago. Clock striking twelve. Like a forgotten memory, begging to be remembered—even as a story, even just as a song.

 _Time_ , he recalled.

Some sense of it circled in his mind—koi in a small pond, swimming in infinite, Sisyphean circles. Never stopping, never turning in any other direction but forward for, oh—where else was there to go?

The Doctor breathed and the air was in his lungs. He breathed out and the pressure left the centre of his chest. And yet, and yet, and yet—he felt _nothing_ ; he watched the process of his life go on but could not feel it, could not feel the pull of gravity, could not feel the relief that’s supposed to come with breathing.

Inhale, exhale—but an involuntary routine necessary for survival. No poignancy, no metaphors—just air.

Just air.

He was a ghost, a cosmic observer of his own life as it transpired around him.

His head was propped up on a pillow. He knew his head, at least, was reclined. He thought himself lucky that he could perceive even that. Before him was a scene—and it was exactly that, just a scene to him. His open eyes looked towards it and he could hear, he could visualise the room around him; and yet, and yet, and yet— he could retain nothing. Crisp sheets around his body, soft in his fingers and yet he could not hold them. His skin, he felt, was not real.

He was not real—even his name, the Doctor, was but a figment. A story, a promise, a legend, a song, but not a man.

Where confusion, where fear, where anxiety should have settled in his heart of hearts—he could feel nothing. He could not admit that that frightened him more than anything. His heart raced, his ears popped. Yet he could not move, not even utter a grunt. There was only the nothingness of floating.

This was not his place; this was not his body; this was not his home.

Questions swum around in his head like wisps of smoke that he couldn’t grasp. _Where was he? What was going on? Who was he? What was happening? Who were the people in the room with him, speaking in hushed whispers as if he could not hear them?_ He couldn’t though, not really; his eyes were merely half lidded, blurred colours and curves of the scene were all he could take in.

A man spoke. The same man from before, continuing.

“The one they talked about. Journey. And Danny—”

“Shut up,” Clara said, hushed.

 _Clara,_ he remembered.

Big brown eyes came to mind—kind eyes, he remembered. Fierce and fearsome and fearful all at the same time. His heart sped up and his head twitched to the side. Her voice, the memory of her— as if he were swimming back from the void of himself, breaking the surface just to see the sunshine of her smile.

 _Clara_ , he remembered.

The Doctor groaned softly, lowly.

Clara threw a look towards him but saw that he hadn’t moved. He was sleeping, as far as they all knew, or something close enough to that. Sleeping fitfully, perhaps, but still asleep. There was no such thing as sleeping soundly in this day and age; she knew that too well. He was still as stone upon the soft, worn mattress of her bed.

She continued, “We don’t know if he can hear us—”

“ _Really_ isn’t the time to bullshit me, sweetheart—” Jack growled, terse and aggravated.

“You saw the state of him, Jack!” she hissed. “He hardly remembers a bloody thing! He knows he’s from UNIT, he knows he was working on a cure—he has to get it piece by piece. We _can’t_ rush him!”

“He’s almost _killed_ you!”

“He wasn’t himself!”

“But if it’s him—”

“All the more reason to keep him hidden away!” Clara screeched through grit teeth.

Breathless, her chest heaved as her jaw clenched. Though Jack towered over her, she did not back down from his glare—until she did. Until she had to. Her eyes closed and her shoulders dropped. Donna rested an arm around Clara’s shoulders to steady her. Jack’s glare then softened as he exhaled; tears fell from his eyes and he wiped them away just as quickly as he forced himself to breathe easy. This was not her fault, he had to remind himself. None of this was anyone’s fault.

“I shouldn’t have asked him to come out with us,” Clara muttered, her voice – for the first time – small but full of emotion. “I didn’t—I didn’t know…”

“You couldn’t have known,” Donna whispered, gentle as an embrace. “None of us knew.”

“How long has it been since we’ve had contact with the Brig?” Jack asked, forcing his rage down.

“Martha hasn’t been heard from since she met with him, according to Shona, but it’s barely been a week since she’d gone. She could be fine. Journey’s been gone for three weeks, though. Not a word since then so we can assume the worst,” said Clara. She sighed and threw her head back as she blinked her tears away. Her hands were in fists.

“God, I hate how normal that sounds,” she choked, her voice breaking. She inhaled sharply.

A pause came about the room, acrid and stale, before Clara spoke again. “This is all my fault.”

“It’s not—look, I’m sorry I lost my temper with you, you know it’s not you I’m mad at, but—”

“ _Jack._ ”

“You can’t blame yourself for everything that goes wrong, Oz,” said Jack.

“This really was my fault, though, and you know it,” she countered. “He wasn’t ready—”

“He looked pretty good to me,” he said. “It was a surprise to all of us.”

“He needs more time to get better,” she said.

“Time’s not on our side though, innit?” said Donna, coming in between the two. They looked to her, mirrored twin motions of their heads turning. She held her hands up in a defensive stance. “Sorry but it’s not a luxury we can afford, is it?”

“But we have enough of it for _this_. Even just a little bit,” Clara replied, hand firm upon the table. “They’ve got all the weapons. It was bad enough when we were only putting up with the undead, now  _this?_ ”

Donna and Jack looked away, knowing she had a point.

“He’s the only hope we’ve got of standing a chance and to do that, he needs to get better,” she continued.

“What if he doesn’t get any better?” Jack asked.

“I don’t want to think about that—”

“Well, you have to,” he said. “I’m sorry, Clara, but right now—we’re banking on your word that this guy’s who Danny said he was. Who _Journey_ said he was. And right now, we don’t even know what it is we’re really up against.”

“I know. I know,” Clara sighed. “Soon, okay? Really soon, I’ll tell him everything. Get him up to speed. Just give him a bit more time, that’s all.”

“He’s been out of it for five days now,” said Donna. “We haven’t heard a flippin’ blip from SRR. We’ve lost two of our very best. Three, if Martha’s lost to us too but God, I hope not.”

“I _know_ that!” Clara said through grit teeth. She looked at neither of them—only looking at the table, blinking away tears. She spoke swiftly and gave neither of her comrades the chance to give a rebuttal. “Believe me, I _know_ that. But right now, he is the best chance we’ve got. If what that goddamn coup was all about was real, and it’s looking really bloody likely that it was, and if we didn’t have _him_ —we might as well pull a bullet in every single one of our heads right now because there’d be no point to any of it! There’d be no point in going on! And we won’t have any chance at all if he’s dead or if he can’t get any better. All those people dead… all of ours who’ve died—it’ll all have been for nothing if he’s gone!”

Silence filled the room once more. The Doctor was drifting in and out of their conversation, barely picking up bits and pieces of what they’d all said. Donna put a hand on Clara’s back and gave her a gentle pat. Jack let his shoulders drop, sighed, and nodded. Clara, upon seeing that, did the same.

“We _have_ to survive,” she said, finally. “We _have_ to. And for that to have any chance of happening, he needs to live. He needs to recover. We need to know what he knows.”

“It really _is_ him, then, isn’t he?” Jack asked again.

“Who else could he be?”

 

* * *

 

 

_Memories are stories—memories, however, are not how things happened but they are all that what remain. So, then, what happens when there is so much that you cannot remember?_

_What happens to the story when there are so many pieces of you missing? Who do you become? What story do you follow? Do you know which story you are following? If we are made up of stories, who are you when you have nothing to remember?_

It was a few hours later that the Doctor was found asleep. Lines protruding around his closed eyes as flashes of his past played over and over in his subconscious mind.

Journey, in her gear, with both of them still somewhat cleaned up and still hopeful and determined. There were men and women – in ridiculous red hats, and dear God… so many _motherfucking_ guns. Every single person surrounding him fully armed and armored to the teeth, including him—although he carried significantly more than anyone else did, metaphorically speaking.

Doctor John Basil Foreman was a professor, a scientist, and a doctor who, weeks before the global outbreak reached critical stages, was the leading expert on the disease that was spreading faster and faster.

The people in power, of course, had initially dismissed the claims as simple fearmongering from less developed countries. It was not until John sought the help of his friend, Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, that they were able to present proof of the impending outbreak to men and women at the table of 10 Downing Street.

The proof he’d presented was an encased infected infant—his granddaughter, Susan, who was found with her hands, feet, and mouth covered in her own father’s blood. They had been staying with him since the murder of the girl’s mother just the day before. Samwise Foreman, blood pouring from the open gash by his throat, was not turned thanks to his father’s mercy of a shot to the head. John had been keeping up with the news, with the theories; with the murder so close to his family, and with the science too overwhelming to ignore, he knew better than to disbelieve the impossibility right in front of him.

But for Susan, no—as a child barely a few months old, he theorised, perhaps she had the chance to be saved. That the process could be reversed. After all, she had no fatal injuries as her father did. Or perhaps as his daughter was already in the military, his wife had passed so long ago—Susan was the only family he had left. He simply could not.

Surely, something had to give—what was the point of being a doctor if he could not save those he loved?

So, with the right people convinced came the funding, came the ammunition, came the endless spinning of the truth to contain the panic. Still, John and his team with UNIT did their duty. They looked for a cure.

Most of what they found, however, was insubstantial. Near the end of his endless experiments and discrete travel all around the world, they simply found ways to delay the disease with vaccines, nothing even remotely close to accessing a cure. Some had even volunteered themselves to the cause, to be experimented on with the potential vaccines against the disease but all John could find were ways to suspend the process by a few minutes to a few hours at most.

He worked for endless days, countless hours, and with almost no sleep—surrounded only by death, gunshots, and more and more bloody death than any one man should ever witness. His name had started to disappear in the lips of the soldiers who surrounded him, one by one, until he was only ever referred to as a doctor.

As _the_ Doctor.

Soon, his title was all he came to know too.

The memory of John ebbed further and further away as he started to forget even his granddaughter in the mix of all the corpses and the turned that surrounded him. Of all the men and women and children he’d failed to save, he lost himself in the obsession of his promise. The tears and shouts of those who begged him to save them, replaced by groans of failed experiments.

The Doctor learnt, by then, to not waste time on mourning. He’d forgotten how, eventually, and he just moved on to the next, and to the next, and to the next; dedicated to the cure. He reasoned with himself that even if all the choices he had were bad ones, and they were, he still had to choose.

It was just before the uncontrollable, worldwide outbreak began that the Brigadier came to him to inform him of a plot that some of his soldiers discovered. Some of the people in power came across one of his theories that he never thought to actualise—to outfit volunteers with transcranial electromagnetic gear, to infect them, and then use them as shields so the army could gather and protect the still living civilians from the other uncontrolled undead.

However, there were those who saw this plan of his and wanted to turn his science into something else. Outfit undead volunteers who could make recruits of the fallen—an army that would never perish; unfailingly loyal, hyperaggressive soldiers under one mind who infected everyone else who was still themselves; it would be an unstoppable army. The one who held the controls for this army could have what remained of the living world bend to its knees.

He would never agree to this, of course. When he found out, it was practically a slap back into sanity. He would fight, of course. The alternative was unthinkable. It would be… God, it would be…

_A world in darkness, ruled by fear and death._

_Maniacal laughter._

_Rust in the air from blood; smoke from gunshots._

_A ringing in his ears; his heart beating so fast it felt like he had two._

“Hey!”

The Doctor woke.

His chest was heavy with air and he heaved and heaved, as if his lungs were empty of it. Sweat down his temples, a hand against his heart. He would have rubbed his eyes but he felt something new. Pressure on his arms, squeezing them; his eyes blinked into clearer vision and he licked his lips. Air passed through his thin, cracked lips. He heaved again as the vision before him cleared up.

_Cleared up._

“Clara,” he muttered, her name on his lips sounding like a question. Was she here? Was she really?

“Yeah, that’s me.” He felt fingers, light as feathers, brush against his temples to his wily, silver curls.

“Water,” he croaked.

“Water. Okay. Sit tight.”

Clara hopped off the bed and he was free to see that his hands were shaking. The Doctor wiped his palms against the rough sheets and scanned the room. He was not where he usually woke up. It was relatively cleaner than his.

Well, actually, it wasn’t. It was only more organised. On a table that might have been a coffee table once upon a lifetime ago, there laid an impressive row of military-duty firearms. On the couch, there was an array of grenades, side arms; and other, cruder, more rudimentary weapons. The scene was a primary arsenal, if he’d ever seen one; a chief’s headquarters.

“Here you go,” Clara said, coming back to his field of vision. She pressed a mug to one of his shaking hands. He rested it against his lap, fingers through its handle to keep it steady. What was she doing here again? “Hey, there. Hello.”

“What—” he began to ask.

“You’re okay,” she told him, answering a question he didn’t ask. And even if he did, he didn’t particularly care to know the truth. “You’re okay, you’re all right.”

“Clara?”

“You know who I am?” He nodded.

“Okay, that’s a start.” He nodded again. “Do you know what your name is?” He licked his lips, lines formed between his brows. Name? What was his name?

Clara cut away from that and asked another question instead. “Do you know what you’re usually called?”

“Doctor,” he replied. “People call me the Doctor. I don’t— I don’t know why—”

“That’s okay, that’s okay—you don’t have to know just yet,” she told him, nearly overbearingly kind. Those eyes, _those eyes!_ How could something still exist in such a hopeless place, such a desolate time?

He felt pressure on his fingers and when he looked, it was her hand squeezing his. And for some reason, this steadied and eased his breathing. The Doctor looked back to her warm, dark eyes.

“What’s my name?” she asked.

“Clara.”

“And who am I to you?” He paused. She waited, patient. He looked away from her and licked his thin, cracked lips. A breath passed. Crazed, blue eyes went this way and that, as if looking for the answer to her question.

He looked back up at her and said, “A friend.”

She grinned then; her smile breaking like sunbeams through storm clouds. Clara nodded in agreement. “How do you know me?”

“Water,” he answered. “And pizza. There was cheese.”

“Yeah, there was. That’s good. That’s really good.”

“Could I have water?” he asked. Clara lightly pushed the mug he was already holding up to his lips and he took a sip of it, which turned into a long, breathless drink.

“Do you remember where we met?” she asked him after a while.

“Café. Ground floor of a building.”

“What do you remember of the building?”

“Tall. There was—” he paused, thinking. “A short one. Not you but—yellow hair. Burnt bread.”

“Shona?” she supplied. “You remember Shona?”

“And a girl. Dark girl. Angry and—and shouty at me…”

“Journey?”

“I— I don’t know—”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, you’re all right. Try and get a bit more sleep, okay?”

Clara took the now-empty mug from his hands and started to rise but his hand was surprisingly quick in its reflex to reach out for her hand to hold. She turned around and nearly jumped, eyes wide at the suddenness of his touch.

“Stay?”

“Me?”

“Yeah,” he said, breathless. “Stay with me?”

Her features softened and a small smile formed on her full lips.

“Any time.”

 

* * *

 

 

When he woke again, from dreamless sleep this time, he found himself being held. Clara had an arm around him as he’d rested his head against the crook of her neck. He held her to him with his arms around her waist. She leisurely rubbed one of his arms, focusing on the way his hair changed with her every swish and sway. He saw this, and when he looked back up, she was looking at him. She’d felt him stirring.

“Hey,” he said, sitting up and pulling away.

“Hey,” she said, letting him.

“Clara?”

“You know who I am?”

“You keep asking me that,” he said. “Why?”

“I’ve seen it happen before. To loads of other people,” Clara replied with a shrug. “They just kind of black out for a bit. Go on autopilot. Sometimes, I’m not sure if it’s them I’m really talking to. It’s happened to me once or twice, I think. I need to make sure.”

“Did I—” he started to ask but she cut him off.

“Go on autopilot?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“Yeah,” she said. “D’you remember anything from it?”

“My hands weren’t—they weren’t my hands. There was—there was so much,” he said. He swallowed. “No more.”

“Shhh, try not to think about it that too much right now,” Clara told him as she reached out to him and put her hand against his cheek, making him look at her. “Focus on me, focus here.”

“What happened?” he asked. “What happened to me?”

“I don’t think that’s—”

“Tell me,” he said, finding his voice. “I want to know.”

“Doctor, I don’t—”

“Clara,” he said, firm. “Please.”

She dropped her hand on his cheek and sighed. Her shoulders dropped. She rose from where she was sat and went to the kitchen and he watched her, silent as the room they occupied.

“Do you know the Trojan war?” she asked him as she returned with a plate, soft bread filled with a fried egg on top of it, and a mug of water. She gave it to him and he received them, steady and much better than he was doing before.

“Yeah,” he answered as he ate and listened to her story.

“A bit like that’s what happened. A Trojan horde, so to speak. It was a trap; someone was waiting for us. Bet they thought we didn’t stand a chance,” she said, a dark chuckle at the end of her last sentence, as if she’d just spoken a private joke – and she was the only person who understood it.

“One horde was what we expected, right? About a hundred, twenty of us can take. Not a problem. Two hundred, sure. Much, _much_ harder but doable with some expected losses and if the terrain’s in our favour, which it was. But God, this one— we barely made it out. I overestimated how many I should have sent out. They came at us so quickly while we were collecting; it was _insane_. There usually aren’t that many of them anymore. Not this late in it anyway.”

Clara sighed as her head hung low. The Doctor stopped chewing and tilted his head, watching her face. She swallowed and took a sharp breath. When she brought her head back up, her eyes were looking at the ceiling when she spoke again. He didn’t know that she was praying her voice wouldn’t crack.

“We lost John and Rose… Jack’s not taking it very well; he was really good friends with them,” she said. _‘So was I_ ’ went unsaid. He could see the slight tremble in her now but before he could even think of considering comforting her, she went on to speak again and all he could do was swallow. “We haven’t heard from the last SRR either so we’re a bit antsy. Two patrols have gone to set up an evac camps, one up North and one south by Devon, if we ever need to get out of here. Preferably not, as we’d just got this place somewhat livable again. Be a shame to have to start all over again.”

He finished his sandwich and water. Clara smiled and she took the plate and mug from him and she put it back to the kitchen. The Doctor got out of bed and stretched his legs. He looked to the nearby window and below, he saw a familiar road. This was where the café was. Below, there was a small gathering of people who busied themselves with what looked like a large pile of… _something_.

“How long have I been out?” he asked her.

“Six days,” she answered as she came back to the room and sat back down as she let him wander. The Doctor sat back down on the opposite end of her. “You’ve been in and out. Mostly you just kind of stare out into space a bit and mutter. It was mostly gibberish to me but most of it, I think, sounded quite science-y. Very doctor-y.”

“And you’ve been—?”

“Basically been playing carer,” she replied. He blinked and swallowed. “Nothing to be embarrassed about, I promise.”

At first, he didn’t quite understand what she meant. But looking at her, really looking at her, he could see it. Beneath her tender kindness, her skin was peppered with patches of red and purple. Cuts and bruises were all over her arms and parts of her face like just by her jaw and the corner of her eye.

Had they always been there, he wondered. Had he just never seen how much pain she must have been in? Or had he chosen not to see?

"You're hurt," he said. An obvious statement.

"Nothing permanent," she joked. There were worse injuries to have, especially in the current climate.

"Did I—"

"No," she said resolutely. "No, you didn't."

"I think I did," he told her. All she could do was smile, as if she was about to tell him that he was okay again but then she thought better of it.

"What do you remember?" she asked instead.

"Flashes," he answered. "This has happened to me before."

"Blacking out?"

"I think so," he said. "I forget..."

"Try not to think about it too har—"

"No," he said. "No, I have to remember." A pause. "Tell me what happened. The Trojan Horde, you said."

"Yeah. Couldn't help myself when I named it; it was too good—"

Trying to veer away from something that could hurt him, protecting him from the truth—he was starting to figure her out.

" _Clara._ "

"Transcranial electromagnetic pulses, you said. The devices attached to their heads."

"The pulses electronically aggravate precise parts of the brain," he started to say. The speech came out of him near without pause, as if he just needed the right trigger. "The virus shuts everything else down but amplifies the prefrontal cortex and mutates the orbitofrontal portions. In theory, the electromagnetic pulses could shut this part down and force the infected, mutated cells to commit suicide. If the theory were correct, this could be the pathway to a cure. Or a vaccine." 

Clara raises a brow. "And how do you know all that?"

"I-" he started to answer but his breath got caught in his throat. "I don't know."

"You said someone's _controlling_ them," said Clara. “How? Zombies aren’t controlled by anything except the virus. That’s why they’re zombies.”

“The way we used to understand them, sure,” he answered. “The undead are just humans in a permanent, irreversible state of decaying stasis. A walking coma.”

“Bit less catchy than the walking dead but okay. What does that have anything to do with the zombies?”

"Transcranial electromagnetic pulses work in various ways. If the pulse aggravates certain parts of the brain, it could enhance or suppress certain physical or cognitive functions. Since they’re humans, their brains still work the same way on a basic level."

"So the pulses can control the zombies?"

"Theoretically. With the pulses, you can suppress the aggression of a circuit-controlled horde..." he went on.

"Or enhance it," she added. Lines of worry started to form between her brows yet he went on, the science pouring from his lips without him really understanding the words he was saying. Luckily, she was there to listen— and to remember.

"Back then, electromagnets were already used to observe the functions in patients who were undergoing surgery or were placed into medically induced comas; it was to make sure that everything was still working. They're not precise since all the neurotransmitters in a living brain are interconnected; there's absolutely no way to control just the one specific part of the brain, it’s too complex. The undead are another thing.

“They're controlled by the spike of mutated, zombified cells; _that's_ what makes them cannibalistically aggressive, completely unsusceptible to suggestion or reason. It’s like a malicious, lethal cancer that possesses the host and keeps the body both dead and alive at the same time. The decaying process has been significantly slowed and preserved by the virus, but ultimately it dies and it seeks out to multiply every time. Everything else has been shut down from the inside during the virus' 24 hour incubation process, like it feeds off of the other cells and destroys it from the inside. At first, I was just trying to delay the virus from destroying everything. 24 hours to 26 to 27 to 28.5... Human test subjects- terminal volunteers… brain dead patients… zombified children…"

The Doctor looked away and towards the window for a while, lost in the moment. Clara waited for him to continue but when it felt like he wasn’t going to come back to himself, she leaned forward and reached for his hand. He turned back to face her and blinked, taking her image back in as his thoughts rearranged themselves once again.

"And that was the cure you were working on?” she pressed, patient but curious. “With UNIT?"

"UNIT? Something..." he started, shaking his head. "Something went wrong... I don't remember-"

"Shh, now. It's okay."

"What was I saying?" he asked.

"Try not to think about it too much right now," she replied. She backed away and knew that that was more than she thought she was going to get for the time being. "Try to rest a bit, don't overdo it."

He nodded his agreement.

"There's another bonfire just outside tonight," she offered.

"Bonfire?"

"Usually, the bonfires are much farther out—"

"Why do you have bonfires?"

"It's, uh—" Clara started, biting her lip. She reached up and scratched behind her ear. "It's not really healthy to let corpses decay in open air. We learnt that a while ago. Can't bury them either, the virus might infect the soil, and we can’t throw them in the sea because they might contaminate the fish and the water, so—"

"You torch them."

"The ones we can gather, yes. Far enough away from camp grounds. The smell can get overpowering," she said. "That stuff’s all done, though. We're just burning rotten wood now. Termites and stuff.

"Would you like to come down? Meet some of the rest of us?"

She was smiling at him, hopeful as she bit her lip again.

He nodded.

 

* * *

 

 

The introductions were as awkward as he’d expected them to be and yet, everyone was remarkably pleasant, despite the circumstances. Their spirits, it seemed, to be as indomitable. Every time Clara greeted one of them so she could make the introduction, as if fully including them into their little band of rebels, they were greeted with smiles, jokes, and friendly greetings.

By the end, when the Doctor and Clara found a somewhat quiet spot by the larger bonfire, the atmosphere around them was some of the most normal he’d ever felt in years. The air around them smelt of smoke from the wood and cooked meat. Skewered dogs, snakes, and rabbits rotated atop smaller fires as others tended to them. People ate and drank and spoke among themselves.

“We don’t do this a lot but I think it’s been quiet enough that we can spare one of these tonight. It’s really chilly too,” she said as she ate her rabbit. He silently ate his own. “Plus, it helps to up the morale. We’ve lost a lot of friends recently." 

“It’s near Christmas, I think,” said the one called Ianto.

“Oh, is it?” Clara asked.

“How’d d’you reckon that?” asked Amy. The one with undercut, fire-red hair, he remembered.

“I don’t know,” Ianto shrugged. “It just feels like Christmas time.”

"John and Rose met on a Christmas, didn't they?" Donna mused. Melancholy swept over them then.

"2006, yeah," Jack replied. "Feels like a lifetime ago."

The fire continued to crackle as the group fell into a somber, mourning quiet for their fallen friends. Amy leaned into Rory. Ianto rested a hand against Jack’s knee and Jack put his hand atop his. The Doctor looked at Clara and found that she had her head hung once again, hands trembling and her skewered rabbit, set aside. Before he could reach out to her, Jack started to sing to himself.

“ _Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…_ ” he sang.

Everyone laughed as Jack’s singing grew louder and more egregiously flamboyant.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea!” Amy chimed in after Jack’s solo. “Rory, go bring it out!”

“Bring what out?” Rory asked.

“ _You know…_ ” Amy said through grit teeth, eyes wide as she nudged him over and over with her shoulder.

“I do?” Rory asked again, a blank look on his face. Amy then dropped her shoulders and gave him a look as she raised her brows. Penny in the air… Rory’s eyes went wide as the penny dropped. “Yeah! Oh, yeah, I do! Hang on!”

Rory rose and ran. To where, no one but he and Amy knew.

“You’re all going to love this,” Amy told them all as Rory went off running.

“What’s going on?” Clara asked.

Amy only winked and said, “Oh, you’ll see.”

Rory’s absence took a while and conversations started to resume. The Doctor looked towards the spot Amy and Rory had chosen by the fire and saw that Amy was the one surrounded by the most children. The little ones were playing quietly amongst themselves, right by the redheaded woman’s diligent eye.

"There are so many children," he said quietly.

"Yeah," Clara said as she smiled, looking towards them. There was a sadness in her voice that made him look back at her. "Amy's great with kids."

"Aren’t _you?_ ”

"I _was_ ," she replied. "Remember the Maitland kids? Practically helped raised them when I was basically a glorified nanny. After them, I became a schoolteacher. Then all of this happened."

"So why aren't you with the children?"

"Long story," she replied. Clara looked straight onward and at nothing entirely. Her jaw was hard and her shoulders, tight. She doesn't want to talk about it. Jack, in the background of their conversation, had gone on to keep singing about a preposterous story on how his grandmother had been run over by a reindeer.

"I thought there would be more of you..." the Doctor mused.

"There are," she said. "Romana's got a small team by Brighton. Secondary refuge, in case things go south here. There’s another one at Cardiff; Gwen and Owen are on top of that one. Most farmable land's at Devon so there's a few people there— Troy, and River have got that one covered... I’ve had Zoe and a small team follow Jamie’s SRR up north to Scotland for a backup evac camp, if necessary. Mickey and Grace have got a team on another SRR, in case you've forgotten. It's a proper operation, for the most part."

"And none of you are with the government?"

Clara chuckled but he knew, he could tell—there was something so sad about the mirth she so desperately tried to display. Bubbly personality with repressed grief underneath, maybe.

"It's complicated," she replied.

There was something more there but before he could ask further, Rory came back with two battered but somewhat fixed acoustic guitars in his hands.

“Now _that’s_ what I’m talking about!” Jack exclaimed.

“Good on ya, Mr Pond!” Donna joined in.

“When the hell did you find those?” Clara asked.

“It took a while…” he replied, sheepish and red as he sat back next to Amy and passed the other guitar to Jack. “Weeks, really. I looked around for some strings and tuned them up. Just got them ready the other day. They should be okay.”

“Oh, this is going to be _so_ good!” Jack said, giving the guitar one loud, heavy strum, then proceeding to play random chords with much gusto, but not quite a lot of skill. Donna and Ianto cringed for him as he did. Amy was laughing and Rory only smiled, happy to have done his part.

“Does this happen often?” the Doctor asked Clara.

“Nope!” Clara replied, her eyes bright with excitement. “It’s a real treat, this!”

Clara’s entire camp then started to crowd around the music, entertained by Jack’s tomfoolery and Rory’s Sisyphean attempts to teach him the proper way to play _Jingle Bell Rock_. Or literally any other song. Clara, however, couldn’t help but notice the way the Doctor’s fingers kept playing against his palms in a very specific way. It was like he was playing the air.

“Doctor?” she asked. “Do _you_ play?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, unsure. “Maybe? I think so.”

“Would you like to have a go?”

“I—” he started as he looked towards Jack and Rory mucking about with the guitars. There was a feeling in his stomach that he could not properly describe when he saw the guitar. A longing, a nostalgia. Finally, he said, “I think I would like that, yes.”

“Oi, Rory!” Clara called out and the music stopped. “Could we borrow one?”

Jack and Rory looked at each other.

“Oh, _this_ should be good,” said Donna, her tongue between her grinning teeth.

“I don’t know if I’m any good…” said the Doctor, now squirming as all eyes were on him.

“Just try,” said Amy.

“You can’t be any worse than Jack,” Donna teased.

“Hey!” Jack said, faux offense on his tongue with a hand on his heart. “My fingers are offended, thank you very much!”

“I’m sure your fingers are otherwise skilled, Jack,” Amy joked. Ianto, who was then taking a bite of his skewered, roast snake, choked.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Amy muttered, a mischievous little look on her face as she threw eyes at Jack and Ianto both.

“Go on, Doctor,” said Clara. “Don’t mind them. Just give it a try.”

The Doctor held the guitar. It was light and smooth, despite the scratches and repairs. When his fingers found the neck, they arranged themselves to a chord and he strummed lightly. And again, and again—the scales, he remembered, as he tried to make sure it was in tune. When he finished, he smiled a little, and realised that all eyes were on him, waiting with bated breath.

He looked at the small crowd that had gathered before him and his eyes went wide, and he swallowed. He looked to Clara beside him, who gave him a little nod of encouragement. _Go on,_ her eyes seemed to say. _Go on._

The Doctor closed his eyes and the melody came to him from a memory, from a time long past. Sad but hopeful at the same time, as he gave rhythmic strums of the strings. He didn’t know the words, he couldn’t remember them, but they felt hopeful. He didn’t know where it was supposed to go, the song he was playing, but the notes felt right. They felt like _something_. Then Clara, beside him, started to hum the melody as if she was starting to remember it too.

From her humming, came the words that she did not know she still remembered.

_Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me._   
_I once was lost but now, am found. Was blind but now I see._   
_‘Twas grace that taught my heart to heal and grace my fears relieved_   
_How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed._

Her voice, soft and clear, rang quietly amongst the small crowd and the camp looked to the pair of them for the music. The melody broke through the crisp, deadly silence of this seemingly endless night and for the first time in what has felt like lifetimes, warmth was more than just fleeting faith against their skin that left just as soon as it arrived.

It was in their blood; ‘twas the comfort of remembering grace. And just like that, the rest of them began to sing with Clara Oswald as the Doctor went on to play.

_My chains are gone, I’ve been set free_   
_My God, my Saviour, has rescued me_   
_And like a flood His mercy reigns_   
_Unending love, amazing grace_

_The Lord has promised good to me; His word my hope secures  
He will my shield and portion be as long as life endures_

_My chains are gone, I’ve been set free_  
_My God, my Saviour has rescued me_  
 _And like a flood His mercy reigns_  
 _Unending love, amazing grace_

The crowd swayed back and forth as they all sang along. Rory, who held the other guitar, played along with him as the singing started to overpower the strings. Smiles were on every face, though the children simply stared wide-eyed at the adults in this rare, shared calm.

Clara closed her eyes and rested her head against the Doctor’s shoulder. A single tear ran down her cheek as her trembling, smiling lips found the words to the last words of the song.

 _The earth shall soon dissolve like snow; the sun forbear to shine_  
_But God who called me here below will be forever mine_  
 _Will be forever mine, will be forever mine, you are forever mine_  


The camp clapped for him when it stopped. There was not a dry eye in sight. And when he looked to them all as they grinned and clapped for him, he could feel himself smiling back. He could not remember the last time he felt this light and warm.

His smile only grew when she looked down to see Clara still resting her head on his shoulder, looking up at him with the same, teary-eyed look on everyone else’s face. He returned the guitar to Rory, who passed it on to Jack, and they began to play festive Christmas carols. It was as if there was weight lifted off of all of them after he played the song.

It was a few minutes of the pair simply sitting in comfortable quiet together, smiling as they looked upon the merriment around the fire, that he heard Clara speak to him again.

“May I kiss you?” she asked. The Doctor blinked.

“I’m sorry?” he asked.

“May I kiss you?” she asked again, just as sure as before. She shifted just so, and laid her chin atop his shoulder. She had a cheeky grin on her face. Her face glowed like sunrise breaking through the darkest night.

So, naturally, lines formed between his wild brows.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I like you,” she told him simply and gave a light shrug of her shoulders. As she spoke, she reached for his hand so she could lace their fingers together. “And because I want to. Because tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone and right now, I would really, _really_ like to kiss you and I don’t want to regret not having have kissed you before I die.”

A palpable pause between them and, for once, the Doctor didn’t look away.

“Do I have to have a reason?” she asked, quieter than before, a more sobered mirth now. “You don’t have to say yes, just so you know. I’m only asking.”

“I don’t know if I—” his tongue flicked out to wet his thin lips. He gulped. ”If I—” he took a breath. ”Know how.”

Clara grinned. “You don’t have to.”

He swallowed again and looked away from her. He bowed his head low and breathed deeply. But he felt her nod against him and she settled to simply resting her head against his shoulder again, adhering to what she took as a no from him. The Doctor looked to her and she wasn’t watching him anymore as her brown eyes looked to the fire, and to the shenanigans that surrounded the campfire.

He looked away again, hands shaking and fingers trembling. His shoulders were stiff and rigid.

“Okay,” he said, finally, after a while.

“Okay?” she asked, looking up at him. Their eyes met and he nodded. She then bit her lip and said, “Okay.”

She leaned up to meet his lips, lashes fluttering as her eyes closed, and he met her halfway. Their lips barely touched before she was already pulling away. There formed a pocket of air between them and their lips were a breath away. He could still feel the ghost of her retroussé nose against his face. His nerves were alive from the sparks of electricity underneath his skin.

Bravery took hold of him then as he surprised himself when his arm snaked around her waist to pull her closer back to him, refusing to let her go. When their lips met this time, it was then that their contact could be called a kiss.

Clara sighed against him, with the pressure of his fingers against the softness of her torso, that he could feel even through her clothes. She raised her hands; her palms against his neck while her fingers caressed his cheeks.

She was so small against him, he realised only now that he was properly holding her, and so soft. She didn’t rush him and their lips moved together in slow, sweet harmony, like an angel choir’s hallelujah. He could taste the words she sang just moments ago and he felt as if he suddenly received a new understanding of the meaning of them. An undeserved blessing, a gift too good that he could never have seen it coming or have conceived could happen to him.

Amazing grace indeed.

He felt the tip of her tongue against his lips and he parted them so she could deepen their kiss. When she broke away for breath, she came back for another quick kiss and another.

The Doctor and Clara, forehead to forehead, were lost to themselves for a moment and they didn’t realise the quiet, knowing grins from those around them, nor did they care to notice until Jack decided to yell, “Well it’s about damn time!”

“Woo!” Amy hollered.

The camp erupted into cheers and more fervent applause. Clara tried to cover her irrepressible smile with her hands, while the Doctor, for the moment, forgot how to be embarrassed. He simply put his arm around her shoulder instead and grinned. He didn’t know that his face could still do that, really.

And, for a few minutes, it felt like the world was turning as it was meant to. There was peace in this starless city as the first snow of winter was only starting to along the heavens.

But, like all things, peace never lasts. Especially in stories like this.

While the camp sang and kept themselves warm by the fire, others started lighting up atop farther away buildings like pinprick stars. More pinpricks came and some of them started to notice and rise from where they were sat. Fire after fire after fire, and instead of snow, ash started to fall as they were scattered by the unforgiving winds. The sound of guitars was replaced by gunshots getting louder and louder by the second.

Then came a bloodcurdling scream tinged with a hysteria with which Clara Oswald had become only all too familiar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, my apologies for my absence and lack of updates. I've been unwell and life has been extraordinarily shit. Second of all, I haven't abandoned any of my stories, I promise! It's just taking a bit longer to update them thanks to... well, life. Thank you so much for your endless patience and continued support of my stories, though!
> 
> All my love,  
> Jo xxx
> 
> P.S. Happy holidays!


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